EAST-WEST FILM JOURNAL

VOLUME 3· NUMBER 1

SPECIAL ISSUE ON THE CITY AND CINEMA

Editor's Note I

Cities on the Edge of Time: The Urban Science Fiction Film 4

VIVIAN SOBCHACK

Future Noir: Contemporary Representations of Visionary Cities 20

JANET STAIGER

Last Seen in the Streets of Modernism 45

PATRICIA MELLEN CAMP

Attitudes Toward Tokyo on Film 68

DONALD RICHIE

Chinese Urban Cinema: Hyper-realism Versus Absurdism

CHRIS BERRY

The Rural Base of an Urban Phenomenon 88

CHIDANDA DAS GUPTA

Seoul in Korean Cinema 97

BAE CHANG-HO

A Tale of Two Cities: Cultural Polyphony and Ethnic Transformation 105

ROBERT STAM

Cities and Cinema: A Selective Filmography 117

Book Review 121

DECEMBER 1988
The East- West Center is a public, nonprofit educational institution with
an international board of governors. Some 2,000 research fellows, grad-
uate students, and professionals in business and government each year
work with the Center's international staff in cooperative study, training,
and research. They examine major issues related to population, resources
and development, the environment, culture, and communication in Asia,
the Pacific, and the United States. The Center was established in 1960
by the United States Congress, which provides principal funding.
Support also comes from more than twenty Asian and Pacific
governments, as well as private agencies and corporations.
 Editor's Note

DESPITE differences separating one phase of the evolution of city from

another, we can legitimately say that the city as a generic term connotes an
identifiable set of meanings. Robert E. Park says, "The city is something
more than congeries of individual men and of social conveniences-
streets, buildings, electric lights, tramways, and telephones, etc.; adminis-
trative devices - courts, hospitals; schools, police, and civil functionaries
of various sorts. The city is rather, a state of mind, a body of customs and
traditions, and of the organized attitudes and sentiments that inhere in
these customs and are transmitted with this tradition. The city is not, in
other words, merely a physical mechanism and an artificial construction.
It is involved in the vital processes of the people who compose it; it is a
product of nature, and particularly of human nature:' This observation
enables us to frame the question of filmic representation of urban experi-
ence more productively. Lewis Mumford makes a similar point when he
says, "Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition
mind:'
If city is a state of mind, then when it finds expression in cinema, cul-
ture assumes a very important role indeed. The diverse cultural discourses
that inform urban experience and the cultural codes that are inextricably
linked with the cinematic narration merit closer attention. Therefore, we
have devoted this special issue to an examination of the relationships that
subsist among city, cinema, and culture.
The relationships that exist among city, cinema, and culture are as com-
plex as they are interesting. City is decidedly a product of culture; but it is
also a producer of culture. Being a generator of social modernization, cit-
ies influence and shape the evolving patterns of culture even as they reflect

I
2 EDITOR'S NOTE

certain essential currents of those cultures. Hence, there is an intriguing

interplay between city and culture. The words city and civilization are
derived from the same Latin root, and in many Asian languages the word
city carries with it connotations of cultural refinement and elegance.
City is a producer of cultural meaning. To read a city, whether it be
New York or Paris, Tokyo or Bombay, in terms of cultural meaning is to
gain a vital entrance to the deeper layers of the culture that produced the
city in question. It can legitimately be said that the city is the most signifi-
cant imprint that a culture can place upon the natural landscape of a coun-
try. Consequently, we can read a culture through the cities that it creates
and read a city through the culture that created it.
"Reading the city" is indeed an interesting theme. Roland Barthes says
that Tokyo has no center out of which the rest of the city radiates as with
cities of medieval origin in the Western world. He views everything as
writing, and, as in a literary text, the city becomes a galaxy of signifiers.
Wittgenstein, approaching this issue from the opposite angle, says that
our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and
squares of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various
periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with
straight, regular streets and uniform houses.
It is sometimes presumed that cities all over the world are the same,
constituting as they do symbols of modernization. But this is a mistaken
belief; cities are far less universal and far more culture-specific than is gen-
erally perceived. They bear the stamp of history, culture, tradition, world-
view, and change characteristic of a given society. This makes the study of
the relationship between city and cinema even more challenging and illu-
minating.
This special issue opens with three papers that have considerable theo-
retical value and deal with city and cinema in terms of the ongoing dialec-
tics between the perceived present and envisioned future, synthetic and
authentic cultures. Vivian Sobchack deals with the urban science fiction
film; she points out how the imaginary city of most contemporary science
fiction films, while not lamenting the failed aspirations of its past, is una-
ble to envision its future. Janet Staiger explores contemporary representa-
tions of visionary cities. She sees the mise-en-scene of cities in science fic-
tion films as utopian commentaries centering on hopes and failures of the
present or implicit criticisms of contemporary city life and the socioeco-
nomic system that gave rise to it. Patricia Mellencamp, with her character-
EDITOR'S NOTE 3
istic wit, examines the intriguing relationship among city, women, and
cinema. She demonstrates how image hides the city, its inhabitants, and its
legends, and authentic culture.
Following these three, we have five papers that deal more specifically
with case studies. Donald Richie discusses attitudes toward Tokyo on
film. He points out how the attitude to city in Japanese films differs con-
siderably from those in Western films; it is more benign, but still one of
disapprobation. Chris Berry focuses attention on Chinese urban cinema in
relation to two highly talented post-Cultural Revolution directors who
have succeeded in introducing stylistic innovations - Zhang Liang and
Huang Jianxin. He characterizes their respective styles as "hyper-realism"
and "absurdism." Chidananda Das Gupta, in his paper on the Indian case,
examines the impact of urbanization on the social fabric and the concomi-
tant changes in terms of values, life-styles, beliefs, tradition, and how
these find expression in Indian cinema, both artistic and popular. Bae
Chang-Ho surveys the ways in which the city of Seoul has been repre-
sented in Korean cinema; he makes a plea for dealing with the more posi-
tive aspects of the urban experience. Finally, Robert Starn investigates the
portrayal of two cities in film - New York and Sao Paulo. Using a Bakh-
tinian framework, he examines how the diverse ethnicities that character-
ize these two large cities meet, clash, and interact.
The eight papers gathered in this special issue on city and cinema, we
hope, will call attention to some vital aspects of this relationship in terms
of East and West.
 Cities on the Edge of Time:
The Urban Science Fiction Film

VIVIAN SOBCHACK

IN I952, science fiction writer Clifford Simak published City, a loosely

related collection of short stories unified by their location in a city that -
over thousands of narrative years - radically changes its shape, its func-
tions, and its citizenry. This episodic and millennial history of urban
transformation is framed and synopsized by its narration as a "bedtime
story" - told by a golden robot to a pack of articulate young dogs gath-
ered around a blazing hearth, wondering if it is true that once, and very
long ago, the nearby city (and the world) was populated by animate,
warm-blooded beings called "humans."
Like most of the cities in science fiction literature and film, Simak's city
and its fabulous transformations over time is clearly a city of the imagina-
tion. Owing no necessary allegiance to representational verisimilitude,
such an imaginary city serves as a hypnogogic site where the anxieties,
desires, and fetishes of a culture's waking world and its dream world con-
verge and are resolved into a substantial and systemic architecture. This
imaginary architecture - particularly as it is concretely hallucinated in
American science fiction film images - is more than mere background.
The SF film city's not-always-made-of-concrete spatial articulations pro-
vide the literal premises for the possibilities and trajectory of narrative
action - inscribing, describing, and circumscribing an extrapolative or
speculative urban world and giving that fantasized world a significant and
visibly signifying shape and temporal dimension. That is, enjoying partic-
ular representational freedom as a genre of the fantastic, the SF film con-
cretely "real-izes" the imaginary and the speculative in the visible spectacle
of a concrete image. Thus, it could be argued that because it offers us the
most explicitly poetic figuration of the literal grounds of contemporary

4
CITIES ON THE EDGE OF TIME 5
urban existence, the SF city and its concrete "realization" in American cin-
ema also offers the most appropriate representational grounds for a
phenomenological history of the spatial and temporal transformation of
the city as it has been culturally experienced from the 1950S (when the
American SF film first emerged as a genre) to the present (in which the
genre enjoys unprecedented popularity). Indeed, not as radical in its trans-
formations as Simak's City (nor as long-lived), the imaginary city of the
American SF film from the 1950S through the 1980s offers us a historically
qualified and qualifying site that might be explored as both literal ground
and metaphoric figure of the transformation of contemporary urban expe-
rience and its narratives in that period now associated with "postmod-
ernism:'l
My purpose, then, is not to analyze the American SF film from the per-
spective of classical urbanism, which describes the city as an "object" dis-
tinct from the subjects who inhabit it - or from the perspective of sociol-
ogy and political economy, which see the American city as essentially
shaped by general "laws" of social formation and capitalist modes of pro-
duction. Rather, my project is best summed up by the editors of Zone (a
new journal focusing on the city), who announce their desire to:

let "the city" emerge, in the complex and shifting fashion proper to it, as a
specific power to affect both people and materials - a power that modifies
the relations between them. This power is neither a side-effect nor an
attribute of a city-substance which transcends them; it is itself the very fab-
ric of the city's consistency (Zone 1987).

What I intend here is to describe phenomenologically the nature of this

affective power as it historically appears in a set of dominant and poetic SF
film images, and then to thematize these images as they diachronically
constitute a lived structure of meanings and affects for the embodied
social subjects who inhabit, endure, and dream them.
Given this historical as well as phenomenological project, it might seem
strange to begin by focusing on a series of "detached" images - images of
the SF city described and given importance "out of context" and not in
relation to the specific texts and narratives in which they playa major or
minor part. However, as Gaston Bachelard (1964, xix) tells us in The Poet-
ics of Space, the poetic image "has touched the depths before it stirs the
surface;' and by its very novelty, it "sets in motion the entire linguistic
mechanism:' Thus, the poetic image can be seen as constitutive of its nar-
6 VIVIAN SOBCHACK

rative context. It generates, coalesces, condenses, embodies, "troubles;'

and transforms the more elaborated text of which it is ultimately a part,
and is itself open to transformation as it performs the semiotic and affec-
tive work of adjusting the systems of representation and narrative and the
demands of the psyche and culture each to the other. 2 The following
"detached images" of the American SF film city, then, are not to be seen as
ahistorical or absolute and essential. They are not really taken "out of
context;' abstracted from the "text." Rather, it could be said that their
poetic reverberations generate and configure not only the discretion of
their individual texts, but also a larger historical narrative - one that gen-
erally dramatizes the transformational character of the American city and
its shifting affective significance for us. It is that larger narrative which is
of ultimate concern to us here. To configure that larger narrative, how-
ever, we first must grasp its figures and treat each of them phenomenologi-
cally - that is, as Bachelard (I964, xv) says, "not as an object and even less
as the substitute for an object;' but rather in "its specific reality;' That is,
prior to thinking or narrativizing the poetic image, we should be receptive
to its reverberations within us, to its compelling originality, which is none-
theless understood as not only immediately significant but also immedi-
ately familiar - an image we have deeply lived but never before imagina-
tively projected.
As previously mentioned, the American SF film only emerges as a genre
with a marked corpus in the I950S. Yet to appreciate the poetic signifi-
cance of this postwar and postmodernist genre's various spatial and tem-
poral transformations of the city from the I950S to the present, we need to
evoke an image of the city as it figures in American film fantasies made
before this period. The following images, therefore, circumscribe the spa-
tial and temporal boundaries of the fantasized city of the I930S - a city,
one must remark, that reverberates quite differently from the city tem-
porally coded as "contemporary" and figured prominently in the popular
and acknowledged I930S genres of the gangster film and the musical.
Indeed, the first fantasized image I want to evoke appears in Just Imag-
ine (I930), a bizarre wedding of SF futurism with musical comedy. Tem-
porally and spatially projected into I980, New York City appears on the
screen as a high rise of skyscrapers intricately connected by a network of
aerial thoroughfares and bridges. In this image, one sees no base and
pedestrian street level. The hero and heroine stop their little one-seater
planes and hover in mid-air to rendezvous - the city around them busy
CITIES ON THE EDGE OF TIME 7

with traffic that, however quotidian, is nonetheless emphatically and liter-

ally "uplifted:' Despite the fact that this rather looney film posits a repres-
sive - if cafe - society, its concrete imagination reverberates as aspira-
tion. Certainly, Just Imagine finds its primary poetic source in Fritz Lang's
Metropolis (I926), whose futuristic bi-Ievel city was inspired not only by
Bauhaus architecture but also by the German director's visit to New York
in I924. Yet Just Imagine is selective in what it borrows from Lang. It does
not visualize a New York whose architecture is as oppressive and nega-
tively affective as it is also liberating and beautiful - a cityscape that, for
Lang, bespoke confusion, exploitation, and "living in perpetual anxiety:'3
Ignoring the baseness, the lowness, of Lang's subterranean vision of
Metropolis, and drawing only upon that film's most affirmative modernist
architecture, the buildings of Just Imagine exist in a cityscape that seems -
to quote Lang in a more positive description of New York - "a vertical
veil, shimmering, almost weightless .. :' (Webb I987, 8). In sum, the New
York of Just Imagine poetically reverberates with the vertical power, vast
size, and ethereal delicacy of Lang's upper city.
The other three fantastic images of the city in the I930S do not appear in
SF films, although one of them is more frequently associated with the
genre than are the other two. This former image is so strong as to have
iconic status - indeed strong enough to have been explicitly acknowl-
edged as the generative force of the narrative in which it so powerfully
stands. Co-director Meriam C. Cooper claims that his "first idea was of
the giant ape on top of a building battling a fleet of planes" (Brosnan I978,
48). I am referring, of course, to one of the final sequences in King Kong
(I933) in which the fifty-foot-tall great ape "towers over" Manhattan,
momentarily triumphant and forever poetically transcendent atop what
once could be called "New York's tallest phallus;' the Empire State Build-
ing - officially opened on May I, I93I, only two years before the film's
release. 4 Despite Kong's fall and death on the street below the world's then
tallest building, it is this ascendent image that lingers - Kong's anarchic
and primal natural presence surrealistically at ease (as well as at odds)
with Western culture's most civilized and modern architectural presence
by virtue of their shared transcendent scope, the imaginative monumental-
ity and aspiration they so differently - but yet so similarly - embody.
Finally, toward the end of the I930S, there are two other utopian spa-
tializations of the cityscape - both temporally coded neither to signify
aspiration toward the future (as in Just Imagine) nor to celebrate transcen-
8 VIVIAN SOBCHACK

dence in the present (as in King Kong), but rather to abstractly represent
the city as eternal ideal. While both of these eternal cities were visualized
in aspiring architecture and explicitly located in transcendent space - that
is, in the highest reaches of the Himalayas and "somewhere over the rain-
bow" - the temporal nature of the "eternal" was differently encoded in
each. The Shangri-la of 1937 seems a mirage of aspiration shimmering in
an eternal nostalgia that has nothing to do with modernity - either
present or future. Aptly titled, Lost Horizon's idealized and lofty city sig-
nifies a utopian reach always in excess of its venal grasp, an eternal ideal
always already ephemeral, lost, always already relegated to the past.
However, the same year that saw the opening of the microcosmic, uto-
pian, and modern city that was the 1939 New York World's Fair (icono-
graphically architected in the idealist geometry of the Trylon and the Peri-
sphere) also saw the opening of The Wizard of Oz. There on the screen,
visualized as a fantasy within a fantasy, was another essential and ideal-
ized urban image: the Emerald City of Oz. Set off in the distance, framed
by a foreground field of poppies (the stuff that dreams are made of), given
to our sight for the first time, Oz stands as both eternal and modern city -
aspiring, weightless, ethereal, atemporal, and yet evergreen and contem-
porary, its softened skyscrapers at once recognizable and yet giving lie to
the term since they have no sharp rectilinear edges and, belonging to the
sky, have no need to assault it.
What is the theme of these few fantastic film images of the city that
stand apart from more contemporaneous, realist, and "grounded" visual-
izations of urban life in the 1930S? With the exception of Shangri-la (which
in its perpetual evocation of loss seems prescient about the grim side of
modernity, aspiration, and urbanism), they are architected as "modern:'
All are also concretized in an architecture of "aspiration;' and what is
"modern" and "aspiring" is visualized as having commerce with the "tran-
scendent:' Emphasis in these images is on the vertical, lofty, and aerial
quality of the city rather than on its pedestrian and base horizontal dimen-
sion. Thus, more than merely synonymous with "height;' since it further
entails the active reach of aspiration, the "highness" of the city concretely
stands as its most aesthetically significant architectural value - and meta-
phorically stands as its most ethically significant social value. In Topophi-
lia, Yi-Fu Tuan (1974, 28) notes what seems quite obvious, and yet needs
stating if we are to understand how our lived-experience of the city and its
poetic representations have changed from the 1930S to the present:
CITIES ON THE EDGE OF TIME 9
The vertical versus the horizontal dimension? Here a common response is to
see them symbolically as the antithesis between transcendence and imma-
nence, between the ideal of disembodied consciousness (a skyward spiritual-
ity) and the ideal of earth-bound identification. Vertical elements ... evoke
a sense of striving, a defiance of gravity, while the horizontal elements call
to mind acceptance and rest.
Those horizontal elements, as we shall see in the SF films of the 1970S and
1980s, can also call to mind less positive modes of being: resignation, sta-
sis, asphyxiation, and death - and more active modes of being: expan-
sion, dispersion, and play.
The dominant spatial mythology of America has been not only tradi-
tionally nonurban, but primarily antiurban (the paradise of the New
World symbolically located in the garden, the West, the frontier, the wil-
derness and now - with the help of Steven Spielberg - in suburbia).
Nonetheless, as we have seen in these few images from the 1930S, the fan-
tasy of the imaginary city constitutes it in a positive image of highness and
fullness, envisions it as the site of human aspiration - its vertical projec-
tion pointing toward spiritual transcendence and, perhaps, a better and
fuller (that is, a more "civilized" and materially expanded) future. In an
extremely popularized and "softened" way, then, the positive image of the
1930S city has its roots in the earlier urban and technological visions of
Futurism and Modernism.
Given that social events in the 1940S were not conducive to continuing
this utopian fantasization of the city, it is not surprising that, but for the
nightmarish and labyrinthine "low" life hyperbolically figured in the
urban introspections of film noir, most film images of the city during this
period are neither extrapolative nor speculative. We must move into the
1950S for our next set of explicitly poetic images. It is during this decade
marked by nuclear fear and Cold War tensions, by a growing dependence
upon electronic technology, by the emergence of new and global informa-
tion and communication systems, and by increasing consumerism and
suburbanism, that the American SF film coalesces as a recognizable genre
that, more often than not, poeticizes the city through what Susan Sontag
(1965) has called the "imagination of disaster." Two extremely powerful
images reverberate through the 1950S - each spectacularly and concretely
articulating a loss of faith in previous utopian and futurist visions of the
modern city as the architectural and transcendent embodiment of aspira-
tion. Although quite differently, both address the failure of concrete verti-
10 VIVIAN SOBCHACK

cality and "highness" to spiritually sustain and uplift modern existence.

And, as aspiration and "highness" are lost or neutralized, so too is the
sense of a future.
The first image is an angry, destructive one, and it appears in a great
many films of the period - clearly generating its simple and repetitive nar-
ratives as a ritual context in which it serves as center. The elements of the
image are all the same, although their specific articulations may change.
The mise-en-scene is urban and given to our sight in long shot. As well,
the city in this image is identifiable: New York; Washington, D.C.; San
Francisco. Culturally symbolic and discrete architectural features like the
Statue of Liberty, the Coney Island roller coaster, the Washington Monu-
ment, and the Golden Gate Bridge place and "name" the urban scene and
give it a specificity that makes its immanent destruction seem an immedi-
ate, contemporaneous event. Into this scene comes a destructive force
which may take any of three forms: it may be an apocalyptic natural force
like a tidal wave or a comet; it may be a primal Beast or Creature; or it
may be a technologically superior alien war machine. In each instance,
however, the result is the same - the razing of the city and, most particu-
larly, the bringing low of those monuments that stand as symbols of mod-
ern civilization's aspiration and pride. In When Worlds Collide (1951),
New York is inundated by a tidal wave and its buildings topple; in The
Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), an atomically awakened prehistoric
creature stomps cars and fleeing people, smashes the New York skyline,
and tangles with the Coney Island roller coaster as it mindlessly seeks its
ancient breeding ground; in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), the sleek
and quick alien craft of technologically superior extraterrestrials castrate
the Washington Monument and bring the nation's capitol low.
It might seem that the affective power of this image derives from the
same source as that of primal Kong atop the Empire State Building swat-
ting planes as if they were flies. Yet this is not quite the case. The fascina-
tion and poetry of destruction is not what the image of Kong is about;
rather, it reverberates and touches us deeply with the visible - if brief -
resolution of a monumental social and psychic desire, of both the building
and Kong's impossibly epic aspirations. The 1950S image I am describing
here is not about resolution, but about dissolution. Its poetic reverbera-
tions have nothing to do with aspiration and ascendancy and everything
to do with, as Sontag (1965, 44) puts it, "the fantasy ofliving through one's
own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity
CITIES ON THE EDGE OF TIME II

itself;' Thus, the failure of modern and urban civilization and its aspira-
tions is poetically represented in appropriately monumental images which
constitute an "aesthetics of destruction" whose peculiar beauty is found in
"wreaking havoc, making a mess" (Sontag 1965, 44). The city's aspiring
verticality, its lofty architecture, its positive "highness" that thrusts civili-
zation toward transcendence and the future is - through privileged special
effects - debased and brought low, and in a mise-en-scene that is bustling
with contemporary activity and traffic and emphatically temporalized
as "now;'
The other image of the failure of the aspiring city is equally powerful,
yet quite different - maintaining the city's highness, but temporalizing its
value as "past:' Here, the city's lofty architecture is not destroyed or
brought low; rather, its originally positive and transcendent value of
"highness" becomes dominated by the negative and nihilistic value of
«emptiness." Highness thus remains an ideal value but one that has little to
do with human being. Indeed, as Philip Strick (1984, 47) reminds us: "Sci-
ence fiction writers like Simak, Bradbury, and Kuttner, with varying
degrees of irony, have frequently recognized . . . the ideal city contains no
citizens whatever;' Again, appearing in numerous films, the basic elements
of this poetic response to the ideal of highness remain the same across a
variety of SF elaborations. In Five (1951), we see two characters enter New
York - an empty concrete canyon whose walls are skyscrapers, whose
floor is punctuated by static and forlorn automobiles distraughtly angled;
nothing moves but the car in which they slowly ride, and a skeleton stares
out at them from a window. In On the Beach (1959), trying to find the
source of a signal from a radioactively dead America, submarine crewmen
wander an empty San Francisco. And in The World, the Flesh and the
Devil (1959), the image of deadly stillness and emptiness overwhelms one
with a sense of irrevocable loss as a single character roams through New
York, into a vacant Times Square, down an abandoned Wall Street,
around an aseptic United Nations building. Cars eternally stalled on a
bridge, newspaper blowing down a city street caught up in some ill-begot-
ten draft, street lights and neon often blinking on and off in a mockery of
animate existence - this is the iconography of emptiness and stillness that
marks the American cinematic imagination of the post-holocaust city in
the 1950S to the mid 1970s. And this imagination is nostalgic - always
already fixed on an unrecoverable past rather than on a future that has not
yet occurred. One of the elements of our lived-experience of the modernity
12 VIVIAN SOBCHACK

of the city is a sense of its immediate vitality: its present-tense and up-to-
the-minute activity, its busyness, its people and traffic always in motion.
To see the city empty of that activity, that busyness, concretely emphasizes
its "highness;' but also temporally codes the value of such architectural
aspiration as "past:' Marking the death of the city as a functional as well
as architectural structure, skyscrapers in these films stand as monumental
gravestones. Although this emptiness seems to linger on into the 1980s -
in American films like Dawn of the Dead (1979) and Night of the Comet
(1984) - it appears less as this nostalgic response to the city's originallofti-
ness and the failure of its aspiration than as a positive opportunity to
dramatize the ultimate consumer fantasy of having a shopping mall all to
oneself (barring a few extremist shoppers in the form of ghouls and zom-
bies).
The destruction of the city and its symbolic architecture and the city as
empty graveyard - these two powerful poetic responses to the failure of
the city's aspiration (and to the failure of "modern" civilization) mourn the
outmoded value of highness, the ineffectual outcome of aspiration, but
they still hold highness as a positive value and offer no alternative to its
failure. Things get even worse in the 1960s and most of the 1970s. If the
utopian vision of the imaginary city emphasizes its concrete highness and
its spiritual fullness as positive values, then the 1950S SF imagination kept
at least one of those positive values operative - even if only in a literal
way. That is, in those films where the city's concrete highness is destroyed
and brought low, its literal fullness is asserted in busy activity and an
emphasis on the "masses" (whether they are screaming beneath the behe-
moth's scaly feet or cooperating with the "authorities"). And in those films
where the city's utopian fullness is challenged by a literal emptiness, at
least its concrete highness remains. However, from the late 1960s to 1977
(the year that marks the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and
Star Wars), the image of the SF city poeticized neither highness nor fullness
as positive values. Rather, both were imagined negatively - and turned in
on themselves to become lowering oppressiveness and crowdedness.
Indeed, if the utopian SF city is perceived as aspiring, then the SF city dur-
ing this period is clearly dystopian and perceived as asphyxiating.
Pointing to the despair of a country negatively involved in both domes-
tic and international contestation, Joan Dean (1978, 36-37) describes the
SF films of the late 1960s and early 1970S as articulating "a diminishing fear
of nuclear apocalypse" and "a growing concern with domestic, terrestrial
CITIES ON THE EDGE OF TIME I3

issues - most of which are related to totalitarian government control of

people's lives or to over-population, food shortages, pollution, and ecol-
ogy:' She goes on to say that the "single theme" that "dominated the sci-
ence fiction imagination between I970 and I977 was overpopulation and
its concomitant problems of food shortage and old age:' The image of the
city that generates SF film narratives of this period emerges most forcefully
in Soylent Green (I973). This is a New York City that no longer aspires but
suffocates and expires. Visible emphasis is not on the height of buildings
but their baseness. Verticality is no longer significant - and emphasis on
the city's horizontal dimension stresses its limitation, not its openness. In
2022, New York is not seen as full but as impossibly overcrowded; its pop-
ulation is forty million. People overflow the streets and most live and hud-
dle in dark masses and clots on the sidewalks, alleys, and stairs of build-
ings that all look like tenements. Their whispering and overlapping cries
and coughs and sobs are so modulated and thinned and distanced that
they sound like the sighing of some desolate wind. This New York City
has no monumental center, no moral center. Indeed, it is all constrained
and corrupt, all inner city. The mise-en-scene is dark, claustrophobic, pol-
luted, and dirty, and, as Robert Cumbow (I984, 4I) points out, in "its
crumbling buildings and rotting cars were the beginnings of . . . junkyard
futurism:' But this is a futurist image that evokes no future. This New
York city is literally a concentration camp, and the temporality its con-
straining spaces construct cannot stretch and stream forward, has nothing
to do with positive temporal progression or expansion in space. All is
entropy and decay. In the late I960s to the mid I970s, the SF city has no
positive values to sustain it - and so it falls down and apart. Thus, many
of the films of the period - from I968's Planet of the Apes to I978'S
Logan's Run - imagine the old ideal model of cities like New York and
Washington, D.C., in a fantasy of "the body in pieces;' their monuments
and buildings now fragments and potshards strewn on an abandoned
landscape on a radically altered planet. The aspiring city, once the center
and architectural symbol of civilization, has fallen in ruins, is no longer
functional, is no longer the center of human activity.
Indeed, by the I980s, the idealized and lofty city of SF is imagined as
completely decentered and marginalized. The citizens of dominant bour-
geois culture are either "offworld" in outer space or in the suburbs. 5 In
I977, with Star Wars and Close Encounters, George Lucas and Steven
Spielberg provided the mainstream and nostalgic routes by which to
 VIVIAN SOBCHACK

Escape From New York - that city in 1981 explicitly imagined as all
prison. These films rally a cinematic exodus from the constraints and pol-
lution of the failed city by all those upstanding and economically fran-
chised folks who believe (and rightly so) that the "Force" is with them, or
(wrongly so) that "when you wish upon a star, it makes no difference who
you are:' What results from this mass bourgeois exodus, however, is a
peculiar and hallucinatory screen liberation for those Others who are left
behind. They are the dregs of bourgeois society, the riff-raff, the punks,
the winos, the crazies, the gays, the druggies, the blacks, the hispanics, the
new orientals, the homeless, the hipsters - everyone previously marginal-
ized and disenfranchised in bourgeois urban culture. Let loose in a city
which now has no center and no constraints, which has been "junked"
rather than urbanly "renewed;' this newly dominant and diverse popula-
tion energizes and reformulates the negative and nihilistic urban values of
the 1960s and 1970S as sublimely positive. In a complete reversal, the
imaginary SF city's lowness, baseness, horizontality, its crowdedness, over-
populatedness, and overstuffedness are celebrated and aestheticized. That
is, the old imaginary and centered SF metropolis is totally resigned to its
ruination, its displacement to its own edges, its concrete transformation
from city as center to city as inner, from aspiring city to city dump. But
this totalized and concrete resignation to the debasement of the city results
in its symbolic and positive re-signing. The junkyard, the city dump, the
trashy edges of town are culturally reinscribed as an exotic urban space
that eroticizes and fetishizes material culture, that is valued for its marvel-
ously un selective acquisitive power, its expansive capacity to accumulate,
consume, and contain "things;' any thing, and its existential status as irre-
futable testimony to the success of material production. The omnipres-
ence of waste serves as a sign that the unseen digestive tract of advanced
capital's body politic must still be working, indeed working "overtime"
and at full capacity. The city is thus re-energized - finding both a new
function and formulating a new aesthetic. It explicitly serves as the most
monumental and concrete consumer, while its un selective juxtapositions
and conservation of material artifacts reconstitute it as both the world's
greatest collage and the world's greatest "pop" collector. As Fredric Jame-
son (1984, 76) puts it:

The exhilaration of these new surfaces is . . . paradoxical in that their

essential content - the city itself - has deteriorated or disintegrated to a
CITIES ON THE EDGE OF TIME 15

degree surely still inconceivable in the early years of the 20th century. . . .
How urban squalor can be a delight to the eyes, when expressed in commo-
dification, and how an unparalleled quantum leap in the alienation of daily
life in the city can now be experienced in the form of a strange new halluci-
natory exhilaration - these are some of the questions that confront us. . . .
Two powerful SF city images emerge within the context of this new
urban exoticism and its erotics of commodification and consumerism.
And, given that the postmodernist city is experienced as having no center
- being all center or decentered, dispersing its activities in every direction
- it is not surprising that the site of both these images is Los Angeles. The
first and most aestheticized comes, of course, from Blade Runner (1982).
Its Los Angeles of 2019 is a crowded, aggregate, and polyglot megalopolis
- one that is experienced less as base and degraded than as dense, com-
plex, and heterogeneous with its multinational and marginal populace,
additive architecture, sensuous "clutter;' and highly atmospheric pollu-
tion. This is a city that stimulates and exhausts the eyes, a city one never
wants to leave because there is always - literally - more to see. (It is
hardly coincidental that the eye is such a crucial element of the narrative.)
The architecture of this imaginary Los Angeles is built from "layers of tex-
ture;' so that:

visual information is imparted in every square inch of screen. Details prolif-

erate. The umbrellas carried by extras have lighted tips because the streets
are so murky. The television monitors that have replaced traffic signals pro-
vide deliberately poor pictures. Skyscrapers are built on top of existing
structures - and are shown ... in their hundreds of stories ... (Mills
1982,45).
Despite the skyscrapers, the visual experience of this Los Angeles has little
to do with verticality and loftiness. Rather, the trajectory of our attention
tends to stay grounded - fascinated by the city's transformation of its
ruins, its "retrofitted utilization" (Mancini 1985, 13), its "spaces and
objects whose original purpose has been lost, due not to obsolescence but
rather to an overinvestment brought about by constant recycling" (Alliez
and Feher 1987, 44). It is not surprising that industrial pipes and ducts fig-
ure prominently in the mise-en-scene (as they will even more explicitly in
1985'S Brazil). This Los Angeles is literally exhausted - generating that
strange blend of hysteria and euphoria that comes with utter fatigue.
The emphasis in the second SF image of Los Angeles is less on design
16 VIVIAN SOBCHACK

than it'is on random, discontinuous, and dispersive movement. It seems

no accident that the company that made Repo Man (1984) refers to itself
as Edge City Productions. Where the Los Angeles of Blade Runner is
decentered by being all center, the Los Angeles of Repo Man is centered by
being all margin. Where the Los Angeles of Blade Runner unifies its out-
moded and vastly disparate material signifiers into new "retrofitted" and
eroticized architectural forms, the Edge City of Repo Man celebrates con-
vulsive spatial discontinuities in a constantly moving culture: its mise-en-
scene is not cluttered, merely littered - with occasional newspapers,
strange people, garbage, drunks, dead derelicts, and abandoned sofas
punctuating otherwise empty and unwalked streets. Indeed, the city is per-
ceived as a set of discrete and unconnected spatial rather than architec-
tural fragments - framed by the windshield of a moving car that, in this
city of repossessions, is always changing hands and drivers and points of
VIew.
What we have here is the city in a schizophrenic representation -
"reduced to an experience of pure material Signifiers, ... of a series of
pure and unrelated presents in time" (Jameson 1984, 72; emphasis added).
The city does not cohere, has no causal logic to unify it. Yi-Fu Tuan (1974,
190) points out in a discussion of Los Angeles as the "automobile city":
"Driving on a freeway can be disorienting. A sign, for example, may direct
one to the far, left lane for an objective that is clearly visible to the
right... ?' But repo men like Otto and Bud find sublime pleasure in these
discontinuities, automotively "troping" the city's streets and freeways -
that is, rhetorically swerving from expected trajectories to create new rela-
tions of meaning, or as the film's philosopher Miller would say, new "lat-
tices of coincidence?' The Los Angeles of Repo Man is a city whose
spatiality is not bound by architecture but rather by trajectories of move-
ment which, no matter how seemingly random, will - like the freeway
system - eventually intersect. Thus, no matter how they disperse them-
selves, repo men, vicious L.A. punks, a lobotomized nuclear physicist, a
notorious pair of Hispanic car thieves, and a Chevy Malibu with a trunk
full of extraterrestrial aliens keep meeting up again. Whereas the pastiche
of new and old and recycled material objects, aesthetic styles, and even the
narrative itself in Blade Runner constituted Los Angeles's temporal mode
as neither past nor future but as literal and increasingly collective present,
Repo Man's Edge City is temporally encoded as neither past nor future
but as an eternally recurrent present.
CITIES ON THE EDGE OF TIME

Thus, the imaginary city of the most contemporary SF film, while not
mourning the failed aspiration of its past, is not really capable of envision-
ing its future and, rather, is euphorically lost in the play of its material
present. The imaginary Los Angeles of Blade Runner and Repo Man, the
New York of Liquid Sky (1983) only hallucinate their liberation from the
bourgeoisie who have gone off to live in Steven Spielberg films or gone
Back to the Future - only dream their complete reversal of bourgeois uto-
pian values. These cities, in visible fact, eroticize consumption and
fetishize material culture in a scenographic paean to advanced capitalism.
And, while these cities celebrate their countercultural funkyness, their
heterogeneity, horizontality, and cultural leveling, their alienated terrestri-
als and terrestrialized aliens whose differences supposedly don't make a
difference in this dispersed and marginalized culture (1984'S Moscow on
the Hudson and The Brother From Another Planet are, after all, the same
movie), they function as virtual ghettos - or, wishing upon the same bour-
geois star, effectively efface those differences that do make a difference
who you are: that is, gender, race, class. Positing, on the one hand, a new
and liberating model of the city and, on the other, buying back into its
failed model by merely reversing (rather than altering) its terms and val-
ues, the imaginary and postmodernist city of the American SF film is truly
a city on the edge of time, offering us a hallucinatory future we might
want to visit, but a present in which - unless we just happened to be bour-
geois cinemagoers and slumming - we wouldn't want to live.

Vivian Sobchack teaches film studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Past president of the Society for Cinema Studies, she has published many articles
in diverse journals as well as several books: Screening Space: The American Sci-
ence Fiction Film; An Introduction to Film, 2d edition; and, forthcoming from
Princeton University Press, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film
Experience.
18 VIVIAN SOBCHACK

Notes and References

I.Since there have been many debates surrounding the concept and definition
of "postmodernism;' for the purposes of this article, I refer the reader to Jameson
(1984) and to my use of Jameson's work in relation to the American science fiction
film in chapter 4 of Sobchack (1987).
2. On this issue, see also the chapter on figuration in Andrew (1984).
3. Quoted in Webb (1987, 9). Indeed, reading Lang's description of New York,
one is reminded more of Blade Runner's imaginative SF cityscape than of any
other - including Lang's own Metropolis.
4. Brosnan (1978, 47). See also Webb's (1987, II) description of the building's
"phallic crown, designed as a mooring for dirigibles:'
5. Of particular interest here (and specifically related to Steven Spielberg's
oeuvre) is Yi-Fu Tuan's (1974, 236-24°) discussion of suburban values and ideals.

Alliez, Eric, and Michel Feher

1987 "Notes on the Sophisticated City;' Zone, 112:44.
Andrew, Dudley
1984 Concepts in Film Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bachelard, Gaston
1964 The Poetics 0/ Space, trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press.
Brosnan, John
1978 Future Tense: The Cinema of Science Fiction. New York: St. Martin's
Press.
Cumbow, Robert C.
1984 "Survivors: The Day After Doomsday;' in Omni's Screen Flights/Screen
Fantasies: The Future According to Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Danny
Peary. Garden City, New York: Dolphin/Doubleday.
Dean, Joan F.
1978 "Between 2001 and Star Wars," Journal of Popular Film and Television,
7,1:36-37.
Jameson, Fredric
1984 "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism;' New Left
Review, no. 146 (July-August):53-94.
CITIES ON THE EDGE OF TIME 19

Mancini, Marc
1985 "The Future Isn't What It Used To Be;' Film Comment, 21,3:13.
Mills, Bart
1982 "The Brave New World of Production Design;' American Film, 7,4:45.
Sobchack, Vivian
1987 Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. New York: Ungar.

Sontag, Susan
1965 "The Imagination of Disaster;' Commentary (October):42-48.
Strick, Philip
1984 "Metropolis Wars: The City as Character in Science Fiction Films;' in
Omni's Screen Flights/Screen Fantasies: The Future According to Sci-
ence Fiction Cinema, ed. Danny Peary. Garden City, New York: Dol-
phin I Doubleday.
Tuan, Yi-Fu
1974 Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Val-
ues. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Webb, Michael
1987 "The City in Film;' Design Quarterly, 136,9.
Zone
1987 "Forward;' Zone 112:11.
 Future Noir: Contemporary
Representations of Visionary Cities

JANET STAIGER

ONE OF THE most immediate signifiers of the genre of science fiction is

the representation of a known city in which readily distinguishable sec-
tions of today's cityscape are present but other parts are rewritten. Hence
an advertising supplement in The New York Times (21 June 1987) locates
its commodity, the United Nations Plaza building, within a redesigned -
"100 years from Today" - New York City. The proposed endurance, and
consequent value of the property and its address, is reinforced through the
supplement's second-page photo of the Dakota apartment building in
1881, which "remains a bastion ofluxury living:' Thus value exists in loca-
tion and in style. Good investments require a sense of the place of the
building in its relation to a present and a future urban environment,
including its access to transportation lines and contingent developments.
Furthermore, the architectural style will not only evince the present good
taste of its occupants but anticipates directions of design. Consequently,
within the commodity's value is incorporated its ability to forecast signifi-
ers of "luxury living:'
But that is not all. According to Anthony Giddens in Sociology: A Brief
but Critical Introduction (1987, 101), in modern cities and within capital-
ist economies not only are lands and buildings situated within an
exchange system but "space itself becomes commodified" (italics in the
original). As urbanization spreads, all environments are transformed,
becoming non-natural. City parks, pedestrian malls, a tree in a planter
along the sidewalk represent city-dwellers' attempt to influence the
milieux in which they live, and as New York City residents know, even
sight-lines from buildings can be zoned and sold. It is not merely a rhetori-
cal gesture of the ad to claim that one distinguishing characteristic of "the
special world of 100 United Nations Plaza" is

20
FUTURE NOIR 21

views that go on and on, day after day, year after year.... In all directions
dramatic and glamour-filled Manhattan vistas delight the eye. The pano-
rama of the East River, the Rose Garden and the elegant greenery of the
United Nations, the vitality of the midtown cityscapes. They all serve to
give a special aura and a special value to 100 United Nations Plaza. (pp.
4-5)
This utopian vision of monopoly capitalism surely invites the desire of
those capable of sharing its dream ("Residences from $330,000 to
$5,000,000"). 100 United Nations Plaza, one hundred years from today,
will be clean, sleek, accessible by land or air, and visionary - in both
meanings of the word. It is, and will be, modern.
However, as modernism continues to respond only to the aesthetics of a
select few! and capitalism's benefits fail to spread evenly, the signifiers for
high modernism and monopoly capitalism are potential sites for a dialogi-
cal rewriting that implies the alienating decay and deadening of that
vision. If corporations assume that the designs of their buildings "commu-
nicate the company's identity to its various constituencies" (American
Way, IS November 1987, 52) and TransAmerica and Citicorp (echoing the
ambulatory Prudential Rock) devise commercials highlighting the pyra-
mid towers of their corporate headquarters as signifying their mobile or
personal presence in numerous cities and landscapes, then it is scarcely
much of a leap to argue that in today's popular imagination modernist
architecture is associated with dominant, powerful multinationals. Addi-
tionally, it is not surprising that texts and films skeptical or critical of the
effects derived from the institutions housed in a specific type of architec-
ture will "talk back" to that institution via the appropriation, transforma-
tion, and corruption of its signifiers - here the style and design of the
building. The firms' towering vision from which chief executive officers
gaze at the world below can be made to imply as well their cynicism
about, yet pervasive responsibility for, the failures of modern social and
economic life.
This discursive procedure is not new, being a long-standing practice in
the arena of science fiction, and theorists of SF have already noted that the
genre is as much about the present as the future, since any envisioned
tomorrow derives from premises about today. As Samuel Delany (1980,
179) notes about literary SF, "with each sentence we have to ask what in
the world of the tale would have to be different from our world in order
for such a sentence to be uttered - and thus, as the sentences build up, we
22 JANET STAIGER

build up a world in specific dialogue with our present conception of the

real:' Without much difficulty, such a comment applies as well to filmic
representations of future cities. Consequently, the mise-en-scene of cities
in SF might be understood as utopian commentaries about the hopes and
failures of today or, inversely, dystopian propositions, implicit criticisms
of modern urban life and the economic system that produces it.
In this essay, I want to look at three instances of such a criticism. While
I shall draw in other examples of utopian or dystopian visions of cities for
purposes of contrast, I find stimulating the similarities of Blade Runner,
Brazil, and the television program Max Headroom. Although these three
texts hardly represent the only trend in picturing the future, 2 their appeal
suggests tapping certain strands of discontent with our society. Further-
more, even if other versions of tomorrow may not include all four of the
aspects of the "future noir"3 cities that I will discuss, they often produce
permutations from this central 4 core. These permutations are significant
in that they may generate very different political expressions from the
future noir texts that I am treating. In fact, I will not claim any unified
"political unconscious" for these three. What the three do share in com-
mon is the strategy of quoting motifs of high modernist architecture which
become ironic within terms of the context of plot developments and
related mise-en-scene. Additionally, interpretations of the three texts indi-
cate that criticisms held in common include assertions of flaws of various
types in the social formation that the satirized institutions represent,
abhorrence of the process of products signifying "life-styles" (late capital-
ist commodity fetishism), and fear of the pervasiveness of information sys-
tems that overwhelm human senses. Yet the three texts differ. While Blade
Runner and Max Headroom criticize elitism and class distinctions in
international and monopoly capitalism, Brazil condemns the hierarchies
and bureaucracies of the social welfare state, also associated with monop-
oly capitalism.
Perhaps because of their common strategy of attack, the discursive
sources of their imagery, or their similar criticisms, Blade Runner, Brazil,
and Max Headroom do share four features in the mise-en-scene of their
visions of another world. First of all, the present and future are conjoined
via the device of a postmodern cityscape in which traces of modernist high
rises and pyramid and glass towers intermingle with debris from revival
architecture and urban sprawl - a sort of Le Corbusier's utopian Contem-
porary City meets Robert Venturi's concrete strip Las Vegas. The winner is
FUTURE NOIR 23

uncertain, but the loser seems to be us. In addition, these cities are dark,
lit only indirectly and arguably from completely artificial light sources.
While part of the dimness is most likely due to advantages for special
effects technology, the metaphoric implication of an end to civilization or
alienation from natural light pervades the atmosphere. Darkness and
urban-design chaos as bricolage also permit labyrinthian and entropic cit-
ies where only overhead schematics can provide a sense of orientation
among debris, decay, and abandonment. Thus, in all four features, these
dystopias' uses of city architecture comment on a potential postindustrial,
age of communication society. The forecast is not favorable. For the
future noir city is more nightmare than vision, more anxiety than wish ful-
fillment.
To understand these films' pessimistic visions of the future, it is valuable
to trace strands of their historical sources in earlier architecture and uto-
pian social planning that work as subtexts for the veneers of modernist
cityscapes. Importantly, moreover, earlier and contemporaneous fictional
utopian and dystopian literature may have provided some imagery for
modern designers. Certainly, from the perspective of a Foucaultian
archaeology of knowledge, particular figures reappear in both fiction and
reality with eerie frequency. Having provided a cultural, symbolic, and
historical context for possible semantic ranges of meaning for particular
features of these films' representations of cities, I will then explore the four
features, simultaneously arguing that a cultural historian should ground
interpretations of iconic representations within both the historical logic of
their appearance and the specificity of their function within the individual
text.

UTOPIAS AND DYSTOPIAS

Technically, "utopia" means "no-place" (it is perfect and imaginary),

although as originally used by Thomas More in his 1516 monograph, it
suggests somewhere at a spatial distance from the status quo (Lowe 1982,
46). Instead, "euchronia" is the appropriate word for anticipations of the
future, while "dystopia" derives from a prefix implying impairment or
abnormality. Indeed, dystopias seem to be fabricated as corrupted ver-
sions of some utopian (or euchronian) scheme rather than initiated out-
right. Robert H. Walker (1985, 132) provides another valuable distinction
regarding terminology. He distinguishes between "communes;' which usu-
 JANET STAIGER

ally "offered agricultural or village models;' and utopias, which "tended to

accept cities and technology and to redeploy them in ideal terms;'
As historians for utopian projects report, the first attempts to envision
some perfect social and political order probably requires turning further
back than to More, at least to Plato's Republic. After More, visions are
numerous. Early founders of the United States hoped to settle the uncor-
rupted American wilderness as new Edens. James Oglethorpe planned for
Georgia to be an orderly asylum for debtors; William Penn wanted "a
green, symmetrical, Quaker town in the woods along the Delaware"; and
Cotton Mather drafted "an HOLY CITY ••• the STREET whereof will be
Pure GOLD" (Walker 1985, 120).
I find it significant that these new Edens require a specific physical
structure, with plans emphasizing symmetry and order in addition to spe-
cifically valuable building materials (green nature or golden lanes). Ease in
personal transportation and interpersonal communication is important
too. Thus, from at least the 1700S in the United States, the "new age" or
the "golden era" has an implicit isomorphic relation to spatial configura-
tions, types of architecture, and paths of communication among people.
The social and political map for the utopia is doubled in the schematics
for the cities and managed environments. (Washington, D.C., is a good
case in point.) In fact, the schematics may be part of the therapeutic pro-
cess of the utopia. As Walker (1985, 121) points out, for some "planners of
ideal communities" such as Frederick Law Olmsted, Frank Lloyd Wright,
the New Dealers, and Buckminster Fuller, "whatever their scope, the
design of the manmade and natural setting was a crucial factor in elevat-
ing society."
It will be certain features of some utopian designs (symmetry, orderli-
ness, clarity, value) off of which future noir dystopias will play for signifi-
cation, as a sort of oppositional strategy for constructing a dialogical criti-
cism of the social or political order the ideal community represents. Thus,
in film SF, a denunciation of the utopian vision can be elaborated and
interpreted not only through narrative propositions about the society but
also through mise-en-scene - as impaired physical constructions, antivi-
sions of the makers' hopes. Consequently, understanding what specific
utopias might underpin particular architectural designs can be useful in
reading SF films (or speculating about causes for interpretive receptions of
them). I would caution, however, that as meanings shift through social
and historical utterance (or reader reception), what was an original vision-
FUTURE NOlR

ary's "intent" is not so much at stake as a society's distinctive semantic

field of meanings for a style. While I will not attempt to present the latter
in this essay, at least as a starting point, sketching out several varieties of
utopias in relation to their specific mise-en-scene can be pertinent in set-
ting up some parameters for the subtexts for SF and future noir texts in
particular. I shall look first in this section at literary antecedents, moving
in the next one into twentieth-century architecture and a couple of earlier
films before examining in the final part the central three future noir films.
As a literary genre in the United States, utopian fiction seems to have
hit a cycle in the period between I889 and I9I2 when more than one hun-
dred works appeared following the publication of Edward Bellamy's
Looking Backward (I888). It is also generally considered that I880 to I920
marks a major transitional stage in American capitalism and society: the
ending of entrepreneurial capitalism and the unveiling of monopoly capi-
talism. On a more local scale, mass-production needs stimulate assembly-
line routines and scientific management of labor, with time and motion
studies. A predominantly rural society yields to the overwhelming hege-
mony of urbanism as product sources shift from the farm and small town
to centrally located corporations and national distribution of factory-
made goods. Temporal and spatial perspectives begin to change as the
telegraph, telephone, and soon cinema simultaneously shrink distances to
horizons while expanding vistas. Information loads and communication
channels metamorphose. Furthermore, cultural historians describe this
period as including a major alteration in individuals' self-conception. As
advertising promotes conspicuous consumption, we cease defining our-
selves primarily through our type of work and start categorizing us by
what we consume. A culture of production gives way to one of consump-
tion.
The conjunction of utopian literature and economic and social change
is hardly a coincidence according to some scholars. Even as these transfor-
mations were occurring, researchers noted that responses such as popu-
lism, progressivism, and socialism were overt political campaigns promot-
ing specific visions to direct rapid and troubling transformation. As early
as I922, the urban sociologist Lewis Mumford argued in his Story of Uto-
pias that "modern utopias were inseparable from the rise of technology"
(cited in Walker I985, I32n).
Bellamy's optimistic Looking Backward finds "technology and coopera-
tion have banished the harsh inequities so oppressive to Bellamy's contem-
 JANET STAIGER

poraries" (Walker 1985, 136). In opening his story, the narrator, Julian
West, describes to his audience in the year 2000 the misery and squalor
parts of humanity endured in 1887. By chapter three, West's miraculous
awakening concludes with his first sight of the future. Refusing to believe
it is some 113 years later, West is taken by his companions to the rooftop
and asked, " 'if this is the Boston of the nineteenth century.' At my feet;'
Bellamy (1960, 43) writes,
lay a great city. Miles of broad streets, shaded by trees and lined with fine
buildings, for the most part not in continuous blocks but set in larger or
smaller enclosures stretched in every direction. Every quarter contained
large open squares filled with trees, along which statues glistened and foun-
tains flashed in the late-afternoon sun. Public buildings of a colossal size
and architectural grandeur unparalleled in my day raised their stately piles
on every side. Surely I had never seen this city nor one comparable to it
before. Raising my eyes at last toward the horizon, I looked westward. That
blue ribbon winding away to the sunset - was it not the sinuous Charles. I
looked east - Boston harbor stretched before me within its headlands, not
one of its green islets missing. I knew then that I had been told the truth con-
cerning the prodigious thing which has befallen me.
As I suggested earlier, the SF effect works through the device of rewriting a
known city. More importantly, Bellamy's vision is literally first of all that
of a cityscape and of an architectural style. Subsequently, analogies
between this physical world and an invisible but real social formation will
be drawn out.
Walker (1985, 134) describes another utopian novel, Bradford Peck's
The World a Department Store (1900), in which "Peck united producer
and consumer in one great cooperative headquartered in buildings
designed to produce efficiency and unquestioning respect." But perhaps
the best-known - and most influential - writer of the period was British-
er H. G. Wells. Wells's writings might be considered to fall into both uto-
pian and dystopian categories (at times for the same novel), but his 1905
book, A Modern Utopia, clearly suggests Wells's more confident vision.
As Mark R. Hillegas (1967, 71) puts it, this utopia is the "archetypal wel-
fare state." The city represented there, however, is alarmingly similar to a
bleaker variation in Wells's earlier When the Sleeper Awakes (1899): "the
symbol in much twentieth-century utopian fantasy of the 'interdependence
of science, technology, industrialization, mass population, and social
organization' "(Hillegas 1967, 43, citing Richard Gerber). And what con-
FUTURE NOIR 27

stitutes some of the features of this ambiguously positive and negative

Wellsian "Super-City"? "[The protagonist's] first impression was of over-
whelming architecture." The city was roofed in by glass, allowing control
of climate. Surrounded by advertisements, people in the streets were
treated to "babble machines" which provided constant news. Although
the Sanitary Company burned books, people could watch "kineto-tele-
photographs." Furthermore, despite a governmental ordering of social
services, hierarchies among peoples existed, with laborers separated phys-
ically from nobility, living and working underground.
I am assuming you are already anticipating my drawing linkages
between Wells's city and films such as Metropolis, Fahrenheit 451, 1984,
and the three movies for this essay. In fact, for example, a major similarity
in plot structure between Blade Runner and Brazil has an ironic reversal in
Wells's "A Story of the Days to Come" (I897). The love story of Elizabeth
and Denton is contrasted to the "oppressive tyranny of life in the super-
city" (Hillegas I967, 49-50). To escape, the couple flees beyond the edge of
the city into the countryside. In Wells's tale, however, survival becomes a
problem, and the lovers choose to return. Such irony does not occur in
Blade Runner, for any potential problems coping with the wilderness are
masked by Deckard's proposition in the narration that the length of one's
life is uncertain. Satire returns in Brazil, where the trip to the countryside
is revealed to be the hallucinations of our protagonist, Sam Lowry. (Per-
haps he had read Nineteen Eighty-four.) Consequently, although the motif
of escape to nature circulates among the texts, functionally it serves both
utopian and dystopian purposes. Semantically, the motif provides a
"happy ending" in Blade Runner, but it also can be inverted, as in Brazil,
to connote psychosis.
The connections between Wells and cinema obviously are not necessar-
ily direct since much antiutopian fiction has intervened. 5 Hillegas argues,
however, the importance of Wells's writings as predecessors for numerous
motifs in modern literary SF. In particular, he locates Zamyatin's We
(I924), Huxley's Brave New World (I932), and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-
four (I949) as anti-Wellsian tracts. What all three writers objected to in
Wells's welfare utopias were the implications that in spite of the "planned,
ideal, and perfected" social systems, people "are conditioned to obedi-
ence, freedom is eliminated, and individuality crushed; where the past is
systematically destroyed and men are isolated from nature; where science
and technology are employed, not to enrich human life, but to maintain
 JANET STAIGER

the state's surveillance and control of its slave citizens" (p. 3). Such propo-
sitions, I would argue, lead to specific dominant connotations for features
of fictional cityscapes. Wellsian high-rise, climate-controlled, mass-
mediated, and sanitized megalopolises infer benefits of welfare socialism,
but they can also imply state observation and individual alienation. Yet lit-
erary SF is not the only venue for such iconic motifs. They also derive from
twentieth-century urban planning and specific theories of architecture for
modern cities.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY ARCHITECTURAL UTOPIANISM

Although literary utopias created by Bellamy, Peck, and Wells describe

supercities with distinct features, architects were also susceptible to
visionary speculation. Furthermore, the same economic and social forces
operating to determine literary utopias functioned to foster idealist urban
design. Donald M. Lowe (1982, 66-70) argues that earlier planning might
consider visual aesthetics, transportation concerns, and hygienic needs,
but a major transformation is marked by individuals projecting future
economic, regional, and demographic developments. Blueprints began
considering conditions "down-the-road;' so to speak.
Certainly the turn of the century saw the proposal of a number of uto-
pian cities, some of which have provided the basis for actual town plans.
Robert Fishman (1977, 3) looks at three people's detailed designs for ideal
cities in relation to "the economic and political organization of the city,
which could not be easily shown in drawings [but which] was worked out
in the voluminous writings which each planner appended to his designs."
As Fishman (1977, 6) argues, "in the three ideal cities, the transformation
of the physical environment is the outward sign of an inner transforma-
tion in the social structure;' These three are Ebenezer Howard's Garden
City, Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacres, and Le Corbusier's Radiant City.
Howard's 1902 vision may be less familiar to us today although his
notion of small communities of limited size - thirty thousand or fewer
people - surrounded by a "greenbelt" is perhaps closest to the present
state of affairs in major inland cities of the United States. Branched off the
hub of the central city are smaller towns joined by rail lines running into
the metropolitan focal point. Howard was directly influenced by Looking
Backward and constructed a city complex that might handle large num-
FUTURE NOIR 29

bers of urban dwellers while struggling to maintain older traditions of

small-scale cooperation and direct democracy. As Fishman (I977, 8-IO,
32-36) points out, Howard's plan was a nostalgic attempt to retain the
city / country structure of a pastoral England.
On the other hand, Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacres (I945) becomes
the antithesis of Le Corbusier's The Radiant City.6 Wright rejected any
concentration of population. The notion of separating town and country
was inconceivable - neither would exist as such. Hoping for no popula-
tion concentration larger than a county seat, Wright planned thousands of
homesteads, with everyone having a minimum of one acre of land and
transportation occurring by car (rather than rail). His utopia is certainly
not a city as it spreads across plains of prairie countryside. "Organic"
architecture permeated not only the houses but the world as interiors and
exteriors are "opened up;' As with Howard, Wright's Broadacres was
designed physically so as to promote a specific social formation: individ-
ual ownership and decentralization. But if the separated houses indicated
self-reliance, they also endorsed privacy. Stephen Kern (I983, I86-I87)
notes that the homes' external openings are hidden by stone parapets and
porch walls. Walker (I985, II7) connects some of today's urban planning
to Wright's work, such as James Rouse's New Town, Columbia, Mary-
land (I963), but clearly strands of Howard's Garden City influence it as
well as Victor Gruen's important impact on city planning. In the mid-
I950S, Gruen advocated what is now a popular renovation procedure for
downtowns: pedestrian malls in the inner areas, intercept parking lots fur-
ther out, and beltline freeways circling the core area (Clay I973, 62).
Transportation and communication in and around the central, dense core
has always been a feature for urban designers to handle.
If Howard's Garden City most closely anticipates actual characteristics
of today's less than orderly urban sprawl and Wright's Broadacres illus-
trates a plan almost lacking in instances of contemporary use, Le Corbu-
sier's Radiant City and his other proposals stand for what may be said to
be the most evident properties of modernist architecture and its attending
implications for social planning. Although Le Cor busier's work differs
from the most extreme high modernist skyscrapers, the extent to which
his design style has symbolized an official approach in contemporary
architecture is evident in Wolf Von Eckardt's (I977, 3I) pronouncement in
I977:
 JANET STAIGER

Modern architecture died on April 21, 1972. Few architects noticed. The
public did not care. No one mourned. It was never popular. The end was
not unexpected. The International Style - as the architecture conceived by
Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus in Weimar and by Corbusier in his atelier in
Paris, came to be known - had long been feverish, erratic and contradic-
tory. But no one got at the basic affliction, which was that Modern architec-
ture is an abstract art - an abstraction that failed to meet practical human
needs. This affliction caused the authorities in St. Louis, that April morning
five years ago, to do the only thing left to do with the modern highrise slabs
of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project. They blew them up. With dyna-
mite. The first of the 33 identical human filing cabinets collapsed in 20 sec-
onds flat.

Von Eckardt links the utopian sources of the international style to a

twentieth-century avant-garde sensibility which was appalled by the
squalor, chaos, and outright mess of the modern city. Additionally, these
designers considered nineteenth-century architectural styles to be "hypo-
critical, bourgeois Victorian gimcrackery. They wanted 'honest' structures
without ornament" (p. 31). If their plans included the social action of
liberating people from the slums and crowded streets, their goals also
demanded new styles of buildings, cityscapes, and roadways. Le Corbu-
sier's famous maxim, "A house is a machine to live in;' expresses this
group's pleasure in and hopes for technology. Consequently, Le Corbu-
sier's blueprints for his 1922 Contemporary City stress orderliness, sym-
metry, space, and vistas among twenty-four high rises which would house
and office three million people. An elaborate transportation system
becomes the nerve center of the city, but no monuments recall a dead past.
"Corridor streets" are gone, as wide, open boulevards stretch toward a
perceivable linear perspective horizon line. Here are the features that
future noir dystopias will mock.
Furthermore, as Fishman (1977, 188-193) points out, Le Corbusier
hardly envisioned an egalitarian democracy as this city's social formation.
Rather, a technocracy dominated, with hierarchies of planners and work-
ers. Those closer into the center of the city were higher in the lineup than
the laborers living further out. A sort of pyramid of living space and social
caste operated in synchronization. This implied splitting of peoples into
categories also shows up in sharp distinctions between city and country, as
the boundaries between the two can easily be distinguished in Le Corbu-
sier's drawings.
FUTURE NOIR

Le Corbusier's (and others') International Style seems the closest visual

approximation to Bellamy and Wells's literary utopias of planned
societies, and Le Corbusier's own writings suggest the affinities are also
conceptual (although, as I shall suggest below, their societies differ in
some respects). It is also the case that the dense high rise connected by
roadways quickly appears in art as visionary of the future. In photomon-
tage Paul Citroen produces Metropolis in 1923, and Norman Bel Geddes
shows City of 1960 at the 1939 New York World Fair.
In cinema of the same era (1920S and 1930S), set design and story lines
also respond to this version of modernism and its utopian themes. Visu-
ally, both Fritz Lang's 1926 Metropolis and the British-produced Things to
Come (William Cameron Menzies, 1936) duplicate the high rises and
transportation systems of Wells's supercities and Le Corbusier's Contem-
porary City. In Metropolis, the city's orderliness and symmetry above
ground are perhaps more visible in Erich Kettelhut's set design (Eisner
1977,83), but balance and uniformity among parts are emphasized for the
factory scenes (through camera framing) and the workers (via blocking of
actors' movements). Additionally, Metropolis's poster provides a strong
concentration of pertinent motifs - sleek skyscrapers, critical arteries,
and pyramid peaks. The linkages of Things to Come to this system of
visualizing the future are scarcely tenuous, based as the film is on Wells's
1934 The Shape of Things to Come. Here the modern city of 2036, Every-
town, is characterized by multi storied buildings, moving sidewalks, and a
domed, glass shell protecting the climate, marking off city from exterior
countryside, and diffusing light into an even glow.
Besides the occurrence in these films of visual similarities to Wells's and
Le Corbusier's utopias, narrative propositions also connect to those ante-
cedents. A major recurring postulate in both films is the necessary division
and rationalization of labor. This is most pronounced in Metropolis,
where the planners reside above ground in an Edenic natureland while the
workers toil on gigantic machinery, surviving despite backbreaking labor
and regimented assembly-line work. The conflict of Metropolis is easily
solved - some believe implausibly and unsatisfactorily - through the for-
tuitous acceptance by the CEO of the necessity to join the head (the plan-
ners above ground) and the hands (the workers below earth) via the
heart. 7 Through such a conclusion, the hierarchy and paternalism of a
social formation similar to one accepted by Le Corbusier is asserted and
reinforced.
32 JANET STAIGER

Similarities to Metropolis's symbolism and plot conflict can be found

not only in Le Corbusier's work but also in Wells's The Time Machine
(1895). In the year 802,701 the Eloi live above ground in a kind of paradise
while Morlocks exist below the surface, running the machinery necessary
for the Eloi to survive. At night, though, the Morlock emerge, eating the
Eloi. Such a bleak specter in the Wells story should act, however, as a cau-
tion against assuming that recurrent motifs are related to similar political
positions despite narrative and visual comparisons. As I have argued ear-
lier, in discursive formations motifs can be employed both in admiration
of their antecedents as well as opposition ally, inverting (or twisting) the
dominant semantics. Consequently, archaeologies of discourses might try
to avoid a mere cataloging of figures, observing as well their functions
within a fictional world's rhetoric and thesis.
If Metropolis accepts divided labor as a prerequisite for a successful
future, in Things to Come, the final narrative crisis ironically (through its
probable unintentionality) asserts its necessity. After a devastating world
war in which humanity is reduced to a regressive barbarism, the use of
massive machinery and giant turbines rebuilds civilization. Yet this tech-
nological progress and its attendant social harmony are nearly halted once
again when one individual incites masses of people to prevent space travel.
"Halt. Stop this progress" becomes the villainous intervention. Wellsian
socialism and planned economy, using technology for alleviating the pov-
erty and misery of laborers, wins for "a whole world peace;' but to accom-
plish this the intellectual ruling class ignores the voices raised in opposi-
tion and pursues its dream.
The economic conservatism of Le Corbusier and Metropolis versus the
radical visions of Wells and Things to Come are certainly different in their
political analysis of a proper utopia. Yet in these diverse anticipations of
the future, similarities occur in the features of architecture (slab-block
high rises and peaked skyscrapers, breathtaking vistas from the more sig-
nificant buildings, diffused lighting); symmetry and balance in the city-
scapes; orderly and rational mass transportation systems; and efficient,
immediate, and extensive methods of communication (both films visualize
television and computer screens as signal media for mass information).
These patterns will also occur in future noir films. However, they have
taken these positive images of the future as signifiers for more troubled
notions of how maladjusted and distorted the visions might become.
Inverting those motifs' semantics through rewriting by context and par-
FUTURE NOIR 33
ody, future noir films question the economic and political status quo that
would generate such a future. For if the utopias of Wells and Le Corbusier,
Metropolis and Things to Come are bright, optimistic views of possibili-
ties for tomorrow, future noir dystopias seek to establish an opposing
proposition.

THE DYSTOPIAN FUTURE NOIRS

In studying the history of social reform, Walker (1985, 12) maintains that
its dynamics as "directed social change" progress through a five-step
sequence. These are: (I) random negative (unorganized protest); (2) struc-
tured negative (organized protest); (3) random positive (various remedies);
(4) structured positive (organized movement with a constructive aim); and
(5) watchdog (surveillance of institutionalized reform). Obviously, not all
attempts at reform succeed; consequently, some criticisms of the social
formation never move much beyond steps one or two.
I find this outline of use, however, in characterizing the political action
of dystopian texts since the phrasing "random negative;' or unorganized
protest, strikes me as particularly apt. The advantage dystopias have is
that they do not have to provide alternate visions of tomorrow; they can
merely exaggerate or invert utopias, suggesting that aspects of the fantasy
ideal future will eventually produce distortions or contradictions. Consid-
ered as negations of specific fantasies of the future and as unorganized
protests about social tendencies, dystopian fictions criticize specific uto-
pias and function as warning messages about the present day. This is
tomorrow - if we don't watch out.
How soon this tomorrow may occur is part of each dystopia's alarm.
For our future noirs, Max Headroom is probably the bleakest: it is set
"twenty minutes into the future;' although Brazil may have already tran-
spired since it happens at 8:49 P.M., "somewhere in the twentieth century;'
Blade Runner takes place in Los Angeles, November 2019. Moreover, as
predictions of the future, these texts are consistent in their notions of the
city even if their criticisms of the implications of those cities' social systems
differ slightly. In particular, variant attacks on modern architecture as
representing twentieth-century late capitalism, commodity fetishism, and
a class system cross these texts, as well as an associated fear of an age of
information and multinationalism. However, as I mentioned earlier, Blade
Runner and Max Headroom link these problems more specifically to
34 JANET STAIGER

multinational capitalism, while Brazil suggests this is symptomatic of an

advanced liberal welfare state bureaucracy.
One of the most immediate experiences of Brazil, Blade Runner, and
Max Headroom is their kindred presentations of the urban area. More-
over, this cityscape implies certain predictable results for monopoly capi-
talism, the welfare state, and the postindustrial information society which
cohabit in these buildings. For those people who live in the most presti-
gious spaces of the contemporary city are clearly elites, at the top of pyra-
mids in economic or political structures (or both: in this political economy
they become the same thing). The sources of this representation certainly
include real-life ones. Le Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation (1947-1952) lead
to exemplary 1960s structures such as the Alcoa Building (San Francisco)
and the Chase Manhattan Bank (New York City); and Citicorp's, Trans-
America's, and Pittsburgh Plate Glass's peaked corporation headquarters
conservatively mimic in their postmodernism Egyptian and Gothic monu-
ments. Yet despite the grandeur of both real and fictional skyscrapers, the
remaining characteristics of the future noir cities are hardly the site of
order, beauty and symmetry, of light, vision, and progress. Instead, these
environments are failures - both architecturally and socially. This is evi-
dent in so many ways.
Most obviously, the skyscraper and high rise do not necessarily insure
either peaceful work surroundings or harmonious family habitations. The
very privileged and significant inhabitants of the future noir buildings -
all powerful multinational corporations as is common in contemporary
reality - seem to be the sources for disruption of lives. In Blade Runner
the most magisterial of the pyramids to which Deckard flies houses the
headquarters of the Tyrell Corporation, a leading manufacturer of the
androids who, unfortuitously, revolt against their makers and whom the
ruling class insists that Deckard "retire." It is Deckard's conflict with these
directives that animates both the action and the more implicit social criti-
cism. This is a society that has so commodified human labor and animal
life that it genetically engineers it, perfecting it to the point that only
sophisticated devices can distinguish real from simulation. Deckard is
unsure of the borderlines between humanity and mechanics, but paranoia
over its accomplishments requires society keep that distinction viable. As
in the case of elitist paternalism and divided labor technocracies, classes
must be maintained.
FUTURE NOIR 35
In Brazil, the impressive and oppressive lobby to the Ministry of Infor-
mation leads to absolutely uniform corridors and closet offices in which
desks are shared through walls. References to Brave New World and
Nineteen Eighty-four abound as Lowry works for an institution that
habitually invades private homes because "suspicion breeds confidence:'
Classes and hierarchies abound isomorphic with the architecture: police
are stationed in the ministry's subbasement and the CEO'S office is on the
top floor. Part of the privileged class, Sam's mother lives in an apartment
in marked design contrast to that of victimized Harry Buttle. Less a criti-
cism of capitalism and more of a postindustrial, commodified, bureau-
cratic information society, Brazil works in dialogue with its British literary
utopia predecessors. Furthermore, it evokes Le Corbusier's "machine to
live in" as a literalized metaphor - although the habitations may be said
to be more "alive" than the inhabitants. On the one hand, pouring behind
the walls of the rooms are the intestines of the social system: breathing,
pulsating tubes transport food, heat, air conditioning, waste products,
information, and, if one counts the subways, people. On the other hand,
surrounded by manufactured women (teeth are straightened, faces lifted,
fat dissolved), Lowry fantasizes and then hallucinates escape with a dream
woman to a green countryside.
For Max Headroom, the semantical analogies between mise-en-scene
and plot are crystalized in the prominence of the opening titles locating in
the skyscraper the corporate headquarters for Channel 23 - a leading
competitor in the television ratings wars. In the series, protagonist Edison
Carter works as a top-rated investigative reporter, often discovering that
the cause of social and economic injustices is due to his own industry's
drives for profit maximization. Before the television series was cancelled
because of low ratings in fall I987 (and then revived in spring I988), one of
its fictional episodes suggested that a competitor's ratings were being arti-
ficially increased through subliminal electronic stimulation of viewers.
Another episode traced to the CEO of an officially sanctioned information
monopoly the evil plot to exploit for its own profit-making computerized
data which were being fed through the firm's networks. And an early epi-
sode uncovered members of Channel 23'S board of directors as perpetra-
tors of criminal acts that bolstered ratings. Closer to Blade Runner in its
criticism of capitalism, Max Headroom echoes Brazifs postindustrial, age
of information theme. And as with Brazil and Blade Runner, Max Head-
 JANET STAIGER

room's architecture employs a degraded Contemporary City as its target.

For all three texts, modern architecture houses corrupt institutions which
are pivotal sources for the failing social formation.
Thus, the dominant thrust of these future noirs is to use the signifier of
the international high rise or the nostalgic pyramid-peaked skyscraper as a
method of marking out the dangers of the hierarchies and elitism that a
late capitalist class system or a Weberian bureaucracy produces. Yet, addi-
tionally, the signifiers of the cityscape develop bleak semantical connota-
tions not only through intertextuality but via their special contextual and
parodic permutations in each of these texts as four aspects to this city-
scape reinforce these visions of a grim future.
For one thing, if high modernist internationalism hoped to erase the
vulgarity and ugliness of the nineteenth century, it has apparently failed
partially as a result of what it brought with it: its own notions of class and
elitism. The dialectic of the utopian sources of the style's meaning
produces its own critique. For how are categorical distinctions among
individuals to be maintained if they are not visually perceivable and com-
mercially exploited. Advertising and product differentiation in monopoly
capitalism constructs "life-styles" with which individuals seek identifica-
tion as they sort out their own self-image in relation to possible purchas-
able ones. To buy a beer requires knowing, or deciding, that you are a
party animal, a tough but sensitive buddy, or a gourmet. Contemporary
consumer culture requires the buyer to consider who she or he is in rela-
tion to the array of products. Thus, added to the product's original use
value is a new one: constructing self-identity. Consequently, in this con-
sumer society, these cities become mixtures of styles and cultures, tied
together by threads of advertising.
The postmodern city is the result: to high modernists, a chunky stew of
architectural "monstrosities" rather than the smooth broth of sleek uni-
formity, Venturi's strip rather than Le Corbusier's boulevard. Further-
more, if the ruling class inhabit the monoliths and pyramids of modern-
ism, the hoi polloi drift among an ahistorical potpourri of "theme"
architecture ranging from colonialism and Victorian to modernism and
pop. In Brazil, for instance, Lowry's home is most reminiscent of the inter-
national style, with the exterior similar to Le Corbusier-influenced Silver
Towers, home for New York University faculty and staff. Deckard also
lives in such a cubical space, with a small balcony, built-in appliances, and
diffused lighting sources. Mrs. Lowry's apartment suggests late Victorian
FUTURE NOIR 37

bric-a-brac, with antique tables and chintz antimacassars sprinkled

throughout the living room. The Buttles inhabit a clearly working-class
domicile, a K-Mart version of Mrs. Lowry's home. J. F. Sebastian resides
amidst his android toys in a nearly empty grand hotel, The Bradbury.
Frederic Jameson (1984, 80-81) argues in one of his studies of postmod-
ernism that such a figuration of mise-en-scene is indicative of a historical
shift. "I have mentioned;' he writes, "the populist aspect of the rhetorical
defense of postmodernism against the elite (and Utopian) austerities of the
great architectural modernisms ... :' Indeed, a populism may inhabit
advocacies of postmodernist architecture, but in these films the strategy is
more of a deliberate contrast to modernist aesthetics of beauty and order
as the dystopias use "ugliness" and urban bricolage to indicate the impact
of capitalist commodification. Or again, as in Brazil, the criticism may be
of false appearance of options in a choiceless social order, for although the
guests at a fancy hotel can order various meals, they are all served three
scoops of - admittedly different colored - glop, along with a picture of
their "filet mignon:' In either case, commodification is attacked as fetish
and alienating, and postmodernist "choice" of style is false conscious-
ness. 8 The satire is vicious.
This postmodern mix is not only of product styles but in a xenophobic
move also of cultures. An earlier implementation of this device occurs in
Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971}.9 There, Russian and En-
glish languages mingle for the gang of mod streetwise brutes that Alex
heads. Such a use of multilingualism and cultural plurality is evident in
future noir texts as well but with an ominous shift of connotation. Blade
Runner, for instance, describes "Cityspeak" as a combination of five lan-
guages, while advertising montages constructed from Japanese and En-
glish become ideograms spreading across Times Square billboards. Truly
Eastern electronics meets Western electricity, and both produce gigantic
display ads.
As with the mix of life-styles, this concoction of cultures is a result of
monopoly capitalism, now that the world is an international marketplace.
Furthermore, what is bought and sold seems less and less at stake. For
instance, in A Clockwork Orange the range of homes Alex and his droogs
visit plays out the variety of life-styles possible in an England of the early
1970s. As Robert Hughes (1971) puts it in an article neatly entitled, "The
Decor of Tomorrow's Hell;' "The impression, a very deliberate one, is of
cultural objects cut loose from any power to communicate, or even to be
 JANET STAIGER

noticed?' That this is supposedly the age of information produces a fine

Irony.
The pervasiveness of advertising and lack of communicative content are
potent subtexts for all three of the future noirs. In Blade Runner, Wellsian
"babble machines" float along streets dispensing not news but ads. The
route from Lowry's office to the Buttles' home is a corridor (not boule-
vard) of billboard jammed up against the next billboard. As the camera
pans upward, a bleak, nearly desert horizon with factory smokestacks
fleshes out an almost vacant landscape. Carter's program is constantly
monitored in the news station central for its ratings since the function of
television programs is to deliver consumers to advertisers not information
to viewers. Carter's texts only fill the empty air between commercials.
Postmodernism, then, in these future noir texts is not a necessary tran-
sition in history. Instead, a more political bite lies within the function of
this style for these films. The criticism is of commodification of modes of
living, of (sometimes approved) divisions among styles and culture, of elit-
ism, and of surfaces emptied of meaning despite utopian hopes. The
major economic and political institutions may reside in modern architec-
tural monuments, but their offspring are postmodern urban strips nostal-
gically imitating design styles that only convey the content of "product?'
While postmodernism is perhaps the most obvious of the characteristics
of future noirs, the name of the subgenre emphasizes a second feature:
dusk or darkness. Intriguingly, the role of glass and light in literary and
film utopias contrasts these films from their predecessors. For glass domes
protect supercities and an even light glows everywhere. But such choices
also result in the loss of something else: natural climates and sunshine. As
humanity controls its urban environment, something so basically natural
as light becomes artificial.
Additionally, shutting in also means shutting out, although the implica-
tions of glass structures might originally relate to beauty of design and
enhancement of visual pleasure. In architectural history, glass has oper-
ated contradictorily. The completion of the Eiffel Tower in 1889 produced
a sort of revolution in design. "Traditional distinctions between inside and
outside were useless to describe this open structure" (Kern 1983, 185).
Consequently, the avant-garde's interest in "honesty" in style led not only
to deletion of nonfunctional design but also to display of the infrastruc-
tures of the building. This permitted the wide, horizontal windows of the
Chicago School of Architecture. It also constructed the interesting para-
FUTURE NOIR 39

dox of being an exterior display of the interior. Futurist architect Antonio

Sant'Elia called in a I9I4 manifesto for new materials responsive to the
times: "steel, glass, cardboard, reinforced concrete, and textile fibers .
. . . Elevators must no longer be hidden like tape worms in the bowels of
buildings but be accessible and visible on the outside of facades" (Kern
I983, 99).10 Glass becomes part of the side and visual texture of buildings.
Yet as Reyner Banham observes, "The sheer abundance of light in con-
junction with large areas of transparent or translucent material effectively
reversed all established visual habits by which buildings were seen. For the
first time [as a result of glass and electricity] it was possible to conceive of
buildings whose true nature could only be perceived after dark, when arti-
ficiallight blazed out through their structure" (cited in Kern I983, I86).
The paradox, however, is that if a glass structure is built in an unpic-
turesque part of town, its users end up looking over factories and urban
sprawl - the by-products that firm's own participation in industrializa-
tion. Apparently when Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Johnson factory
complex in downtown Racine, Wisconsin, he solved such a visual nasti-
ness by turning all windows in toward the environ's center and by using
translucent rather than transparent glass materials. Frederic Jameson
(I984, 8I) hypothesizes that the Bonaventura Hotel obscures entries
because it "aspires to being a total space, a complete world, a kind of min-
iature city... ;' Indeed, it leaves a "degraded and fallen city fabric" to its
own devices.
Consequently, the darkness of the future noirs serves to draw forth visu-
ally the geometrical block designs of the brown and grey buildings,
sprinkled with smaller rectangles of incandescent and neon light. But trav-
eling through interiors of the homes and along the avenues of city streets,
no natural light greets the individual. Blocks of glass permit diffused light
to enter; they prevent gazes outward, but what would one see? Brazifs
urban transport system is built of blocks of translucent glass. In Blade
Runner, neon tubing is pervasive, even serving as an umbrella handle.
Postmodern urban sprawl and convoluted or artificial sources of light
contribute to a general semantics of decline, and they lead as well to a
third aspect of these future noirs: the labyrinthian character of space. In
all cases, overhead schematics supplied by "omnipotent" computers are
necessary for travel. Transportation systems may merge in the center of
the city, but multi storied pathways now outstrip humanity's abilities to
navigate by eye-level perspective. In a more exaggerated case, Carter
 JANET STAIGER

scouts his subjects via short-wave linkages to the home news center, where
his "controller" has access (via a computer that somehow has access to up-
to-date sensory input) to subjects' movements. Programmed much like the
source of his information, Edison receives his directions in a form that
matches his eye-level perspective while he must rely on those sequenced
commands to reach his destination. 11 Deckard's travels are similarly
through crowded carnival streets rather than long avenues. Lowry cannot
look beyond billboards or through glass walls as he travels. As I suggested
in my introduction, one implication of capitalism is the commodification
of space, with the attendant value placed on vistas. Yet Le Corbusier's
twenty-four skyscrapers have yielded to hundreds of structures obscuring
visions beyond the next-door building. Indeed, the external skeleton of
high modernism becomes a labyrinth of industrialization. If 100 United
Nations Plaza promises views that go on and on, future noir films ques-
tion who is able to share in that hope and how.
Seeing this labyrinthian view of space slightly differently, but in a com-
plementary way, Jameson (1984, 82-84) notes that due to the "absolute
symmetry of the [Bonaventura's] four towers it is quite impossible to get
your bearings in [its] lobby... :' For him, we are in a new "hyperspace" -
"a disjunction" finally exists "between the body and its built environment
... [which] can stand as the symbol and analogue of that even sharper
dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map
the great global multinational and decentered communication network in
which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects:' Thus, with space
as either labyrinthian or "hyper;' humanity's senses, particularly the privi-
leged one of sight, no longer guarantee ability to negotiate space and
determine perspective.
Finally, and consequently, entropy as randomness and disorder in-
creases, and predictions for the future are not of a turnaround. The spills
of waste and garbage, the graffitied walls, the breakdown of appliances
are constant parts of set design for future noir movies. Rain, probably
from smog and auto emissions, falls continually in the Los Angeles of the
androids. Urban hoodlums trash Lowry's car within minutes of his park-
ing it outside the Buttles' home. Carter often scouts around the edges of
his city, near where "blanks" - those on the margins of society and with-
out identity cards - warm themselves by barrel fires.
In "Imagination of Disaster;' Susan Sontag (1968, 213) makes a worthy
observation about SF. She writes, "Science fiction films are not about sci-
FUTURE NOIR 41

ence. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art .
. . . Thus, the science fiction film ... is concerned with the aesthetics of
destruction, with the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc,
making a mess:' If this is the case, dystopias surely must have the upper
hand over utopian fiction, for the ways humanity can allow its own civili-
zation to self-destruct are clearly the challenge for set designers.

As I indicated in my introduction, the four characteristics of postmod-

ernism, indirect lighting, labyrinthian space, and an entropic civilization
seem common to the mise-en-scene of future noir films, and these aspects
yield part of the texts' signification of protest. The grievances are numer-
ous and certainly not cohering around a central plan for reform. Rather
they seem random shots at contemporary deficiencies in present-day life.
Integral to all these dystopias is a bleak criticism of utopian versions of
high modernist architecture and modern cityscapes, exterior structures
which house corrupt economic and social institutions. The semiotic oper-
ation, however, is apparent: transform through context and intertextual-
ity the signifiers of modern life so that they become the signs of a troubled
society.

Janet Staiger is an associate professor in critical and cultural studies at the Univer-
sity of Texas at Austin.

Notes and References

I would like to thank the participants of the 1987 Hawaii International Film Festi-
val and Symposium and Jeff Sconce for comments which I hope have helped me
sharpen my ideas. I also thank Scott Bukatman for many earlier conversations
about contemporary SF; some of this is undoubtedly influenced by his work on
this subject.

I. Its grounding elitism in architectural history will be addressed below.

2. For instance, 2001: A Space Odyssey might reasonably be grouped with
Metropolis and Things to Come (both of which will be discussed below) since, I
will argue, they reinforce class distinctions. Furthermore, the monolith might be
the ultimate modernist building: its appearance generates evolutionary levels to
humanity. Similarly, the Star Wars trilogy and Dune belong to another subgenre,
 JANET STAIGER

one that privileges nostalgia and is a throwback in narrative structure and mise-
en-scene to fairy tales and feudalism.
3. I find it significant in a period of poststructuralism that while I am not the
creator of the term "future noir;' simultaneously I cannot supply its origin. One of
my students, Bert Greene, used the term to describe these films, but he said he
heard it from another student whose last name he didn't know. I rather like the
fact that in an essay about postmodernist SF, I can't properly attribute my source
except to say it is circulating discourse in Austin, Texas.
4. Central only for this paper, not ontologically.
5. However, Melies's A Trip to the Moon (1903) bears many similarities to
Wells's The First Men in the Moon (1901).
6. Robert Venturi makes the opposition explicitly in his chart contrasting
urban sprawl with the megastructure, "Broad acre City" versus "Ville Radieuse;'
See Venturi, Brown, and Izenour (1977, 118).
7. The obvious allegory operating here is Christ's visit to earth to act as an
intermediary between his Father in Heaven and the workers. Yet this religious
symbolism only functions to reinforce a divided labor system - something that
socialists such as Wells would reject.
8. This is possible since the films themselves are not of a postmodern aes-
thetic; that is, these future noir films may display a postmodern mise-en-scene,
taking the value of spectacle associated with that style, but since that mise-en-
scene is represented as the environment for the characters, the filmic effect is that
of criticizing that environment. In every regard, these movies are quite traditional
in their narrative form and style.
9. This is based on Anthony Burgess's novel, where the device originates.
10. Always quick to observe a trend, Time magazine reported in 1968 that one
feature of new architectural shapes was "Honesty. . . . Today architects like to
show how buildings stand by calling attention to the structural system ....
Another school of architects feels that a building ought to tell what is going on
beneath its skin;' "To Cherish Rather than Destroy;' Time, 92, 5 (2 August
1968 ):4°.
II. This becomes even more convoluted since Edison's alter ego is Max Head-
room, a now self-generating computer image compiled from Edison's brainwaves
and a sophisticated software program.
FUTURE NOIR 43
Bellamy, Edward
1960 Looking Backward: 2000-1887. New York: New American Library;
reprint of 1888 edition.
Clay, Grady
1973 Close-Up: How to Read the American City. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press.
Delany, Samuel
1980 "Generic Protocols: Science Fiction and Mundance;' in The Technologi-
cal Imagination: Theories and Fictions, ed. Teresa de Lauretis, Andreas
Huyssen, and Kathleen Woodward. Madison, Wisconsin: Coda Press.
Eisner, Lotte H.
1977 Fritz Lang. New York: Oxford University Press.

Fishman, Robert
1977 Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books.

Giddens, Anthony
1987 Sociology: A Brief but Critical Introduction, 2d ed. San Diego, Califor-
nia: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Hillegas, Mark R.
1967 The Future as Nightmare: H. C. Wells and the Anti-Utopians. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Hughes, Robert
1971 "The Decor of Tomorrow's Hell;' Time, 98,26 (27 December):59.
Jameson, Fredric
1984 "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism;' New Left
Review, no. 146 (July-August).
Kern, Stephen
1983 The Culture of Time and "Space, 1880-1918. Cambridge, Massachu-
setts: Harvard University Press.
Lowe, Donald M.
1982 History of Bourgeois Perception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sontag, Susan
1968 "The Imagination of Disaster" [1965], in Against Interpretation. New
York: Dell Publishing Company.
44 JANET STAIGER

Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour

1977 Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural
Form, rev. ed. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Von Eckardt, Wolf
1977 "The Death of the Moderns (I);' The New Republic, 177,6/7 (6 and 13
August):31-33·
Walker, Robert H.
1985 Reform in America: The Continuing Frontier. Lexington, Kentucky:
University Press of Kentucky.
 Last Seen in the Streets
of Modernism

PATRICIA MELLEN CAMP

ONE COLD, November afternoon in 1987 in Milwaukee, I received my

conference packet for the Hawaii International Film Symposium and Fes-
tival; it included one glossy, brightly colored brochure that stood apart
from the dull official papers and forms. My Hyatt Regency Waikiki bro-
chure - with photos of youthful couples in "fun-filled" settings centered
on Harry's Bar and "Hyatt's Great Hall where sun-splashed waterfalls cas-
cade gently into a tropical pool framed with lush Island flora" - is a
global, pop culture image of Hawaii, of "Hawaii 5-0;' "Magnum P.I.;'
and James Michener. This emblem of free-floating tourist pleasure - now
a theoretical document - promises me "a stay which is far more than just
a room - a stay which is an experience:' "After a day of fun" at the beach
and shopping in "70 shops with souvenir items from around the world;'
"it's an evening of excitement:' This is for me!
However, like the academic who questions while basking in this con-
sumption, the tourist also seeks something less hedonistic - a "meaningful
experience;' usually of cultural difference, which the brochure also prom-
ises: "the Hawaiian program which offers you an authentic glimpse into
Hawaiian culture:' "Authentic culture" is the lure of tourism (and art),
which must stage the "authentic" as public spectacle. But exactly what is
this "Hawaiian program?" Will it involve my learning the hula in public?
This vague word perfectly reveals the futility of tourists (a portable audi-
ence of white, middle-class heterosexuals) ever locating authentic culture
- usually a commodified, singular image traded across time. As if on cue,
my daughter, with her usual acuity, notes a discrepancy: the wide-lapel lei-
sure suits, haircuts, and narrow-shouldered dresses of the fun couples
resemble a Bob Newhart, 1970S rerun. The Hyatt Waikiki, like amor-

45
 PATRICIA MELLEN CAMP

phous pleasure, is timeless, without context. But so is my knowledge of

Honolulu and Eastern cultures severely limited. Given the time warp of
the photos, I wonder if the hotel, or the city, has decayed and whether the
brochure's cocktail leisure is not dated.
For the postmodern critic of pop culture, this would be a site for sore
eyes, which could revel in the leisure of pleasure. However, that model of
the contemporary city, like the singular image of Hawaii as the Hyatt
Waikiki, is a duplicitous one; while arguing pluralism and details of differ-
ence, it has paradoxically traveled into and been mapped over vastly
diverse cultures - erasing differences, repressing details of place. Like the
brochure, which displaces Honolulu and indeed the entire state (in fact, a
group of islands) into the regime of a "program" of authentic, natural
pleasure, the image hides the city, its inhabitants, and its legends; the con-
cept of "the City;' like "the Hyatt;' both promises and conceals what tour-
ism or I980s cultural studies alike cannot produce - "authentic culture:'
A traveling companion for this concept of "the City" is Theory, with a
capital T, which has been superimposed over East or West, rich or poor,
industrial or agricultural - no small gesture of imperialism. This global
venture - replicating the u.s. international exportation and market domi-
nance of film and now television - is led by the fashionable but angst-
laden theorist as nomad (a slippery act of appropriation) or traveler.
In David Lodge's (I984) parody of upper-class academia and theory,
appropriately titled Small World, Morris Zapp, the hip semiotician or
postmodern critic, assesses the scholarly world as composed of cities
strung together by airports, a topography of conference topics. Zapp:

Zurich is Joyce. Amsterdam is Semiotics. Vienna is Narrative. Or is it

Narrative in Amsterdam and Semiotics in Vienna ... ? Anyway. Jerusalem
I do know is about the Future of Criticism, because I'm one of the organ-
izers ....
Why Jerusalem?
Why not? It's a draw, a novelty. It's a place people want to see, but it's not
on the regular tourist circuit. Also, the Jerusalem Hilton offers very compe-
titive rates in the summer because it's so goddam hot.

Funny, perhaps true, but weary.

The Arthurian narrative and structure - replete with arch, jet-setting,
literary clashes between doddering humanism (and sex) and philandering
theory (and sex), in mise-en-scenes of identical cities and the same speak-
LAST SEEN IN THE STREETS OF MODERNISM 47
ers - is Persse McGarrigle's (from Limerick) search for the ideal woman,
Angelica; it is also a parable of this young assistant professor's quest for
the holy grail of tenure and his initiation into the rites of scholarly luck
and fame. Along with ideal woman as lure, the prize is an expensive
UNESCO chair. There are various female academics, among them the glam-
orous, kinky Italian, Fulvia Morgana, but they are objects not subjects of
desire. The book concludes with the young Lancelot's reverie: "as on to a
cinema screen, he projected his memory of Cheryl's face and figure - the
blonde, shoulder-length hair, the high-stepping gait, the starry, unfocused
look of her blue eyes - and he wondered where in the small, narrow
world he should begin to look for her" (Lodge 1984, 385). The eternal
dream of woman has been an inspiration for myth and modernism; here it
is the raison d'etre of conferences. Crucial, of course, is the fact that the
ideal woman cannot be found; if she were, desire and motive, like the
story, most international cinemas, and presumably male literary scholar-
ship, would end.
When asked why he travels so much, Philip Swallow (married but look-
ing for Joy) says (Lodge 1984, 75-76): "Happiness? One knows that
doesn't last. Distraction, perhaps .... Intensity of experience is what
we're looking for, I think. We know we won't find it at home any more,
but there's always the hope that we'll find it abroad. I found it in America
in '69:'
"With Desiree?"
"Not just Desiree, though she was an important part of it. It was the
excitement, the richness of the whole experience:'
I wonder. Is this the same "experience" as the fun-filled one promised by
the Hyatt Waikiki? Is male desire interchangeable with the object of
desire, Desiree? Is this not redundant? What of the female traveler, the
female academic? If told from her point of view, an actual rather than
dream woman, in a claim for women's historical subjectivity and exist-
ence, the story and the theory would necessarily be different.
Italo Calvino tells a parable of the dream girl, quoted by de Lauretis;
this is a dream of history, of founding the city of Zobeide: "men of various
nations had an identical dream. They saw a woman running at night
through an unknown city; she was seen from behind, with long hair, and
she was naked:' (Is she Darryl Hannah, Steve Martin's fantasy in Rox-
anne, a remake of Cyrano de Bergerac?) They dreamed of pursuing her,
and then constructed a city built on the memory of her. "At the spot where
 PATRICIA MELLEN CAMP

she had vanished, there would remain no avenue of escape. Those who
had arrived first could understand what drew these people to Zobeide,
this ugly city, this trap;' "The City" functions as a "delusion and dream"
"to keep women captive" - and it is ugly. Zobeide is a Greek maze, with
the minotaur or woman at the center, with no escape. As Teresa de
Lauretis (1983, 21-22) writes: "It does not come as a surprise, to us cinema
people, that in that primal city built by men there are no women; or that
in Calvino's seductive parable ... woman is absent as historical subject:'
Another detour beckons me. "High-stepping gait" has led me to a
byway or blind alley - to Freud and Delusion and Dream; Small World is
the comic remake. Like the mediocre novel that inspired him, Gradiva: A
Pompeiian Fancy by Wilhelm Jensen (translated in 1917), Freud analyzes
the male scholar's search for the classical woman. However, taking his cue
from Jensen, Freud knows that "the City;' in this case Pompeii, is an
excuse, a symptom; the dream girl has nothing to do with cities, science,
or research but everything to do with desirous men. Norbert Hanhold is
an archeologist; "his interest is fixed upon a bas-relief which represents a
girl walking in an unusual manner ... he spins a web of fantasies about
her ... transports the person created by him to Pompeii ... he intensi-
fies the fantasy ... of the girl named Gradiva [the girl splendid in walk-
ing] into a delusion which comes to influence his acts" (Freud 1956, 33).
Norbert travels to Rome, Naples, grumbling about encountering so many
married couples, and pursues his delusion through the ruins of Pompeii.
Norbert has confused the real, a girl from his childhood, with the imagi-
nary, her image. He is not a well man.
"There is no better reason for repression . . . than the burial which was
the fate of Pompeii and from which the city was able to rise again ... in
his imagination, the young archeologist had to transport to Pompeii the
prototype of the relief which reminded him of the forgotten beloved of his
youth" (Freud 1956,61). Along with the importance of the city and child-
hood memory to repression (and the unconscious; Rome was another of
Freud's metaphors), what intrigues me is Freud's analysis of Norbert's
problem: "A psychiatrist would perhaps assign Norbert Hanhold's delu-
sion to the large group of paranoia and designate it as a 'fetishistic eroto-
mania; because falling in love with a bas-relief ... the interest in the feet
... of women must seem suspiciously like fetishism;' But Freud dismisses
"erotomania" as "awkward and useless;' He goes on to hypothesize that
"An old-school psychiatrist would, moreover, stamp our hero as a degen-
LAST SEEN IN THE STREETS OF MODERNISM 49
erate ... and would investigate the heredity which has inexorably driven
him to such a fate:'
Freud's third and preferred analysis is the literary interpretation of Jen-
sen, the author, who was "engrossed in the individual psychic state which
can give rise to such a delusion .... In one important point Norbert
Hanhold acts quite differently from ordinary human beings. He has no
interest in living women; science, which he serves, has taken this interest
from him and transferred it to women of stone or bronze. Let us not con-
sider this an unimportant peculiarity" (Freud 1956, 66-67). Indeed, let us
not. Unfortunately, modernists paid scant heed to Freud. Scholastic delu-
sions have continued to "have no interest in living women:' The delusion
might be more telling than the cover-up journey or scholarship - a (bas-
relief) fetish. Freud's prognosis for Norbert might serve as a cure for the-
ories of modernism and postmodernism; otherwise, the future is bleak:
"The condition of continued avoidance of women results in the personal
qualification ... for the formation of a delusion; the development of psy-
chic disturbance .. :' (Freud 1956, 68). A real woman, Zoe, is the end of
the delusion, the end of the story, and Norbert's cure.
However commercially banal the brochure, or tongue-in-cheek popular
the novel, Small World, or mediocre Jensen's Gradiva, they share common
premises with the great writers of modernism - that is the myth of the city
as a woman. As Michel de Certeau argues in The Practice of Everyday
Life, when encapsuled as myth, "the City" works to contain specificity
and repress all differences or pollution; it is a myth which creates "a uni-
versal and anonymous subject" coterminous with "the city" itself (De Cer-
teau 1984, 94); the subject is male and the myth totalizing (albeit more
poetic than the concept generated by city planners) and functions to "elim-
inate and reject" waste products which, like poverty, homelessness, and
presumably women, can be reintroduced outside the myth, for example,
in welfare discourses. De Certeau's acute assessment of this "concept-city"
points to "its forgetting of space, the condition of any city's possibility:'
"The City" is neither place nor space but a universal figure of history, "the
machinery and hero of modernity" (De Certeau 1984,95). To this critique,
I must add contours: as this figure comes into focus, it is a shapely female
Image.
Before arriving at the movie theater, I want to stroll through Reflections
with Walter Benjamin. "A Berlin Chronicle" sketches a topography of
childhood memory (setting off desire or delusion?) - a provocative map
50 PATRICIA MELLEN CAMP

of his youth drawn from the streets of Berlin and Paris. "Now let me call
back those who introduced me to the city" (Benjamin 1986a, 3). Like
medieval chronicles, this vivid, spatial map of "moments and disconti-
nuities" (unlike the temporal sequence of autobiography which "has to do
with time ... and the continuous flow of life" [po 28]) begins with a
nursemaid, a trip to the zoo, mother and shopping, wanders through ado-
lescent encounters, fancies sex and love, is guided by poets, essayists (par-
ticularly Baudelaire), and friendship, meanders to finances, father, and
hated school discipline, and concludes with a paternal tale of death and an
ominous warning, "syphilis." As enchanted as I am by Benjamin, I will
focus on two recurring, interrelated figures, representative of the city,
which are superimposed over his oedipal walk: the labyrinth and the pros-
titute.
Childhood is a "period of impotence before the city" due to "a poor
sense of direction" (p. 4) blamed on his mother; adolescence is "a crossing
of frontiers not only social but topographical - a voluptuous hovering on
the brink in the sense that whole networks of streets were opened up
under the auspices of prostitution" (p. II). His political awareness of what
the city hides, the poor, and his social awakening, are equated with sexual
awakening: "crossing the threshold of one's class for the first time had a
part in the almost unequaled fascination of publicly accosting a whore in
the street" (p. II). Behind the facades of the city architecture, its public
image, hidden in the center was a prostitute or Ariadne - eroticism ini-
tially curtailed by his nursemaid or his censoring mother. No matter. "Nor
is it to be denied that I penetrated to its innermost place, the Minotaur's
chamber, with the only difference being that this mythological monster
had three heads: those of the occupants of the same brothel. ... Paris
thus answered my most uneasy expectations" (p. 9). (On his quest, The-
seus had an earlier encounter with Medea who, after her separation from
Jason, had become the wife of Aegeus, the father of Theseus. She con-
vinced her husband to try to poison Theseus, whose sword identified him
to his father. Bullfinch [1959, 125] writes: "Medea, detected in her arts, fled
once more ... and arrived in Asia, where the country afterwards, called
Media, received its name from her:' The shift from Medea to Media, from
woman to country, intrigues me. In Benjamin's account, Medea is the fig-
ure on a ring purchased with friends and destined for his fiancee - "you
only entered its secret by taking it off and contemplating the head against
the light" [Benjamin 1986a, 33]).
LAST SEEN IN THE STREETS OF MODERNISM 51

Benjamin sees Berlin through the streets of Paris and the eyes of Baude-
laire: "What is unique in Baudelaire's poetry is that the images of women
and death are permeated by a third, that of Paris" (Benjamin 1986b, 157).
In the city, the oldest technology, sex, combines with the newest technol-
ogy - mass culture, celebrated as mass transit, skyscrapers, or decried as
commodity fetishism. In his wonderful portrait of arcades and shopping,
"Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century;' Benjamin writes: "Such an
image is presented by the pure commodity: as fetish. Such an image are
the arcades, which are both house and stars. Such an image is the prosti-
tute, who is saleswoman and wares in one" (p. 157).
She, like the city, was fascinating and frightening, representing, as she
did, sex and death; like mass culture, she was available and dangerous.
The city existed paradoxically as the exemplar of art and creativity and as
the symptom of commodity culture - resolutely linked to the figure of
woman. As Patrice Petro (1987, 69) so decisively argues in "Joyless
Streets;' "Berlin also served as the decisive metaphor for modernity, and
modernity was almost invariably represented as a woman:' That Berlin
was the center for mass culture is critical to her thesis. Some critics were
not as subtle as Benjamin. Petro (1987, 72) quotes Carl Zuckmayer's
description of Berlin: "Some saw her as hefty, full-breasted, in lace under-
wear ... her very capacity for cruelty made them all the more aggressive.
All wanted to have her.... To conquer Berlin was to conquer the world:'
In "Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other;' Andreas Huyssen
(1986,189) argues that modernism's fascination with imaginary femininity
"goes hand in hand with the exclusion of real women from the literary
enterprise and with the misogyny of bourgeois patriarchy itself:' Mass cul-
ture, site of the contemptible, is equated with women; real, authentic cul-
ture "remains the prerogative of men" (Huyssen 1986,191). The city is the
turf of both, although in mythology, one serves the other. Thus, the com-
modity fetish of Marx coincides with Freud's fetish - which as we know is
female.
The modernist art and commodity, cinema, picked up this division of
the fetish woman. And, if Benjamin is right that "Only film commands
optical approaches to the essence of the city ... like conducting the
motorist into the new center" (Benjamin 1986a, 8), then cinema, like mod-
ernism's city, is also built on a boyhood dream of woman, a dream
arrested in adolescence, endlessly repeated. Benjamin's chronicle of
modernity is also an old story, a bildungsroman in which the young boy
52 PATRICIA MELLEN CAMP

conquers the city, and woman via desire, on his way to manhood and mas-
tery; in the end, he casts his lot with his father in a shared secret, syphilis.
This old story and the need to retell it might explain why the image of "the
city" is such a totalizing figure. If Oedipus is our repeated narrative, then
the modern city is its site. However, as Petro says, modernism is not the
same as modernity, just as women and their experiences of modernity can
never be captured in accounts of male modernists.
Benjamin's remembrance of things past in Berlin and Paris turns to dys-
topia in the post-World War II emigration to the United States of German
Expressionism; modernism's equation of women with the city and sex is
all that's left in the migration; it becomes the repressed of Hollywood cin-
ema. In It's a Wonderful Life, the adventure of the bildungsroman - jour-
neying to far-off lands for fame and fortune represented by George
Bailey's travel brochures and graduation suitcase - is denied and undercut
in favor of staying at home, in a small town, Bedford Falls defining the
United States as rural! suburban; anti-European means anticity. The real
Christmas threat to the film and masculinity is the city (as well as the lack
of recognition for George Bailey, which sets off a crazed identity crisis) -
that transformation of Bedford Falls by jazz, black musicians, neon,
booze, and prostitutes into a nightmare of male identity - a nightmare
because no one recognizes or can name the hero, George Bailey. In this
nightmare city, women are either prostitutes or asexual and old; perky
Mary becomes a dull librarian who timidly looks down, Mom runs a
boarding house, and both are bleakly lighted by German Expressionist
lighting. The value of home, the nobility of building row, suburban, indi-
vidually mortgaged by savings and loan rather than investment banker
homes, is upheld - along with u.s. culture and strong fathers. 1
Ten years later, after an intense period of film noir, the city of Touch of
Evil, although supposedly only a border town, is equally menacing; it is a
fragmented, noisy, and anonymous place of race, sex, drugs, leather-jack-
eted gangs, and separated couples, traversed by automobiles (that city
emblem repeated from The Magnificent Ambersons as the symbol of
modernity and decline) and represented by motels, an ugly and dangerous
extension of the car and modernity to return, with a final vengeance, in
Psycho; jazz, linked to bars and motels, also means danger, sex. Remem-
ber Susan's attack by the Grandes in the motel. When Vargas returns to
the bar to beat up the Grande boys (meanwhile, missing his wife, once
again), he concludes the brawl by smashing a head against a jukebox,
LAST SEEN IN THE STREETS OF MODERNISM 53
stopping the film's jazz/rock. After this, order is restored. The film's
action, including the moving nostalgia of Tanya's room and player-piano
refrain, is set against the dystopia of modernism - tall oil derricks and
darkness, the detritus of industrialism and modernity. The nostalgic past
- Marlene Dietrich as Tanya - is that dream woman of modernism, here
returning as the good ole days. (The dream of Dietrich refuses to die;
Maximilian Schell tried to recapture her image but failed, left with her
voice and clips as she evaded his project while seemingly complicit
with it.)
Like other modern artists, Alfred Hitchcock built his cinema from an
impossible dream of woman - a dream that was not ugly until perversely
"psychoanalyzed" or viciously caricatured by Spoto without Freud's
understanding. In many ways, Hitchcock is the most sophisticated theo-
rist of tourism. In his films, travel is not always what it is cracked up to
be; tourism can be dangerous, particularly at Mount Rushmore (North by
Northwest) or at a Spanish mission in northern California. Vertigo is
Hitchcock's most direct dream of woman, almost a travelogue; the upper-
class, fashionable Madeleine "wanders" through the streets of San Fran-
cisco and out to various tourist attractions along the Pacific Coast High-
way; she is the seductive lure, the city woman who incites Scotty Ferguson
to obsessively chase her image, only to have this imaginary dream vanish,
like Zobeide, by presumably plunging to its death from the special effects
mission bell tower. That Scotty is a detective and motorist, following
Madeleine in his car, suggests that he is a protagonist of modernism;
caught in his delusion like Norbert Hanhold, he experiences a "psychic
disturbance" in the middle of the film and is hospitalized, shot from a high
angle, unable to speak or look.
The red-haired Judy is the shop girl, on foot, the working girl of the
streets of modernity; she and Scotty stroll together. Even after her fashion
transformation into the ideal, blond, quieter, more refined image of
woman, she is still fictively real - or excessive, which her make-over via a
hair style and a tailored, grey suit cannot contain. Thus, she must die.
Real women have little to do with the edifices of modernism, including
male desire (and Hitchcock's alteration of tourist attractions via special
effects matte shots). She can never be found because she cannot exist, her
nonexistence demanding her continual recreation in cinema. The chase
and her destruction are what counts; Hitchcock leads us on a merry narra-
tive tour of the United States (and earlier Britain), with cities as scenes of
54 PATRICIA MELLEN CAMP

his various crimes. (Hitchcock's films were precursors of the American

Express ad campaign warning us of the threat of travel - particularly
North by Northwest and the 1957 The Man Who Knew Too Much.) Thus,
he is the theorist as tourist or a nomad trying to perfect "otherness" as pre-
cisely sexual difference. However she is punished and contained, Hitch-
cock was fascinated by modern woman.
That the image of the central city of modernism is built from male
desire analogous with "woman" is not, of course, new or surprising. That
this myth has persisted in postmodernist claims for decentralization, plu-
ralism, and the vernacular, however, is rather surprising. A desirous car-
tography of Berlin and Paris of the 1920S, along with the visage of the
male modernist author, hovers over London, Chicago, New York, and
indeed cultural studies everywhere in the 1980s. While the specificity of
war, recession, and industrialism have vanished, the eternal, naked
woman has been transported around the world and back. What is missing
from most accounts is that historical women comprised a significant part
of the crowds of modernity; they went to the cities, to work, and to the
movies. What is missing from postmodernism is women's voices - their
work of the past twenty years in criticism and art alike. While the
modernists didn't bother to look beyond their own consuming desire and
passions, postmodern male critics have not bothered to read women's
writing. While feminism, like the naked woman for modernism, is
invoked as central to any manifestation of postmodernism, the actual
work remains uncited, buried in the revival of another male, heroic pan-
theon, a litany of great male thinkers bewildered by women's silence in the
debates; modernists failed to notice women's presence; postmodernists are
baffled by women's lack of speech - a contemporary displacement of old
and weary repressions, a tactic that is nonsense.
But there is a difference between then and now. What was historical
reminiscence marked by subjectivity in Benjamin's post-World War I
accounts has become vapid flanerie in 1980s renderings; without the
inscriptions of authors and signs of production, the commodity and its
purchase are what counts; what looked back with detached wisdom and
intimate detail has soured to a frantic celebration of the present - one was
predicated on the desire for change; the recent return to the anonymous
streets settles for stasis, the repetition of the same products - "new and
improved" - as difference. Writers of cultural studies are no longer histor-
ical inhabitants of the streets that they praise; neither they nor the streets
LAST SEEN IN THE STREETS OF MODERNISM 55
nor their subjects have any history or idiosyncrasy. Today's critic is an
itinerant, just passing through town. "The City" is anywhere and every-
where, but it is "uninhabitable;' without stories, but particularly without
memories. It is a clever place to visit, but no one lives there - like the
Hyatt. Unlike Benjamin, critics have been lured and seduced by the recep-
tion of commodities, turning their ephemeral writing into hot properties.
The new academic careerist hammers out fast thought, aware that for
fads, like hamburgers, timing (and a macgimmick rather than a maguffin)
is everything. Like a local chamber of commerce, they generate an easy,
singular, saleable, accessible image while not realizing, as Meaghan
Morris so cleverly said, "The boom is over. Snooze, snooze:' Like the real
women banished from the streets of modernism, referents are vanishing
from cultural studies - a clever tactic. As Morris so acutely assesses, the-
ories of subjectivity can no longer tell us who we are or where we live. Per-
haps contemporary theory is not sure what its theoretical object is; one
objective has become the silencing of women's position from which to
speak, a place in enunciation that the women's movement has arduously
claimed only to recently learn, to our amazement, that we didn't write
anything about contemporary issues, after all. This is a classic instance of
postmodern male avowal (the new and improved disavowal), the fetish-
ist's costly, inverse gambit; woman's "lack" of the phallus (which she never
envied in the first place) triggering disavowal has been transformed into
women's "lack" of research, writing, and speaking, which she has accom-
plished aplenty. While seeing was not believing in the Freudian scenario,
hearing has joined the realm of disbelief. Women then turn, in men's
minds, into shrews and braggarts, continually re-citing their own writing,
like the housewife who points out her daily labor when the husband
arrives home, knowing that he will not notice the waxed floors unless
reminded, again and again; after all, women's work is just not as impor-
tant as men's, as academia replays the domestic regime of erasure.
If told from the point of view of the naked woman of Zobeide, the story
might be different. She must have been very frightened and cold, Was she
from Zobeide? Or a visitor? Why was she naked? What had happened to
her clothes? Why was she running away? Where had she been? Where
were her friends? Did she make it home? Or was she murdered in a dark
alley? Why didn't anyone help her? What was her name? Or, perhaps she
was more clever than imagined. Rather than guiding Theseus through the
labyrinth, did this Ariadne take him on a wild goose chase? She has led
56 PATRICIA MELLENCAMP

modernist and postmodernist alike astray, down ever narrowing argumen-

tative paths of their own repetitive making. Everything, for them, now, is
simulation or vague and constant pleasure; all the streets look alike, all
their names sound alike. Her lovers are trapped in an ugly city, trans-
formed into so many Minotaurs, bumping into one another; like a video
game arcade, the maze has become crowded with loud repetition while
she has gone home, to work, to think. She can no longer be bothered (or
frightened) by his desire. Unfortunately, the Marco Polo school of critics,
believing they have abandoned Ariadne while she was sleeping, are now
casting their wandering, fickle eyes on other cultures, specifically Eastern
and Third World, depositing the same myths of mysterious otherness
applied to women in foreign terrain, seeking answers but not really caring
if anyone lives there.
To return to Paris, specifically Jean-Luc Godard and the situationists,
with Japan on the horizon via Nagisa Oshima, and, along with Andy
Warhol and William Burroughs in the United States, the 1960s beginnings
of postmodernism. Both filmmakers occupied the streets and populated
them with youth, drugs, transients, bars, rock and roll, pop culture, and
philosophy - celebrating the vernacular, sometimes the inarticulate, em-
phasizing the sexual. Godard's central characters are women, discontent
with home and marriage. However, his metaphor for capitalism is prosti-
tution, played out over women's bodies and lives. For me, this is yet
another, albeit "working (or not) class" and gritty, everyday, manifestation
of modernism - the banal and bored rather than glamorized dream
whore.
Oshima's metaphor for imperialism and cultural struggle is rape.
Although inscribed within a complex of avant-garde performance, a layer-
ing of the levels of representation, a revelation and interrogation of the
cinematic apparatus's complicity and complexity (not unlike Godard's
project), a rewriting of narrative conventions and enunciation, along with
an almost parodistic inquisition of the intellectual's or artist's connivance
or role in dissecting capitalist exploitation, the sexual metaphor and
enactment is again on woman's body. In both cases, with cultural specific-
ity and difference in mind, woman and her victimization is the central
myth. For me, neither prostitution nor rape nor the preponderant obses-
sion with difference as singularly sexual will do in 1988. While these
"liberated" or "radical" constructions posit woman as victim, she is still an
object of pursuit, without subjectivity of her own.
LAST SEEN IN THE STREETS OF MODERNISM 57

There is a strange similarity among the concerns of Godard and

Oshima then and the writers of cultural studies now, a similarity suggested
to me by a passage in an unpublished essay by Morris, "At Henry Parkes
Motel" (Morris n.d.). Remember the conversation scenes in various
Godard films where great male poets or philosophers either appear, are
directly quoted, or whose words are embedded in dialogue. Oshima also
quotes great, sometimes scandalous, male modernists, his films, like
Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, peppered with meaningful, enigmatic citations,
primarily from literature but also, like Godard, from pop culture and
trash references. Citation and quotation are favored tactics for both. In a
critique of lain Chambers's Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experi-
ences (as exemplifying a current take on culture), Morris writes the fol-
lowing assessment, which could serve as a critique of Godard: She argues
that "populism" today "predicates its pedagogy on the radical dissociation
of person and persona." "Populism" assumes that "anywhere and every-
where the problem of 'theory' is the same;' "Not the least of the little impe-
rialisms performed . . . is to place the 'modern world' under the sway of
an intellectual Prophet who sounds for all the world like an elderly
Humanities professor in a venerable but declining European university"
(Morris n.d., 31).
Then the sentence that first caught my eye: "as an account primarily
(and avowedly) based on the emblematic street experience of un- or under-
employed males in European or American cities (or what then become its
echoes elsewhere), it restricts the scope of enquiry to ... one of the
'growth' areas of that economy.... Perhaps this is one reason why
women, in post-subcultural accounts, still appear in apologetic parenthe-
ses or as 'catching up' on the streets when they're not left looking out the
window. The ways that economic and technological changes in the 1980s
... have been transforming women's lives simply cannot be considered -
leaving them not so much neglected in cultural studies as anachronistically
mis-placed" (Morris n.d., 32). Are 1987 cultural studies the sublation of
early 1960s politics, with Marx dropped out and postmodernism plugged
in? Are we hearing an echo or inversion of Godard's dilemma of the artist-
intellectual in the free-spirited pop studies' professor? This time the ques-
tion is not the intellectual's relationship to the revolution and the proletar-
iat, but the hip, slick 'n' cool academic's relation to television and white,
middle-class college students - a love-it populism takes on a loathe-it elit-
ism: the new left as right politics. If the 1960s have returned, vanquishing
 PATRICIA MELLEN CAMP

the gains of the women's movement and feminism by jumping over them,
regression as forgetting, this might explain the anachronism. If I am right,
the appropriation is depleted and apolitical, divorced from Godard and
Oshima's political concern with the means of production. In the end, I
prefer the modernist image of woman out front, leading a merry and dan-
gerous chase, rather than pathetically tagging along behind.
But, unlike the celebratory take by critics who like mass culture, albeit
without discrimination, or the negative view of the city as a dingy museum
of copies and forgeries, the city as a tourist trap invaded and contami-
nated by mass culture, the view of Baudrillard, there are other ways of
thinking cities - that of Marguerite Duras's script for Hiroshima Mon
Amour and Michel de Certeau's metaphor of the pedestrian, a guide
highly recommended by Morris due to his fine style. To a degree, de Cer-
teau's "Walking in the City" is a revival or postmodern rendering of Ben-
jamin (read through Foucault and linguistics), who will again be my guide
through this spatial terrain. Later on in "A Berlin Chronicle;' the labyrinth
is imagined in another way; rather than what is installed "in the chamber
at its enigmatic center;' he is concerned with "the many entrances leading
into the interior - primal relationships, so many entrances to the maze,
with men drawn on the right and women on the left" (Benjamin 1986a,
31). This maze of stories, of books, of wandering through the city as a
place of unpredicted events, while rigidly gendered, is entrancing to Ben-
jamin and to me. The outline of the labyrinth has shifted - from the
Greek model with its central chamber in which "terror is born" (according
to Umberto Eco in Postscript) to the mannerist model, "a structure of
many blind alleys ... a model of the trial and error process;' and perhaps
on to the "rhizome" of Deleuze and Guattari, a labyrinth with no exit
because it is potentially infinite (Eco 1983, 57).
Benjamin calls this way of thinking the city "the art of straying?' "Not
to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires
ignorance - nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city - as one loses one-
self in a forest - that calls for quite a different schooling. Then, sign-
boards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to
the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest .. ?' (Ben-
jamin 1986a, 9). The wanderer, the strayer from the path, listens, gathers
clues, pays attention to the details of the city, without mastery or a map
yet with knowledge. The wanderer does not have a grand theory, or cen-
tral image, but learns (rather than proves) along the way; the adventure
LAST SEEN IN THE STREETS OF MODERNISM 59
does not have a predetermined destination. For me, this is the inventive,
scholarly path of discovery.
(In the spirit of Benjamin, I will stray, distracted: I just received the lat-
est issue of Time [23 November 1987]; on the bright cover is a declaration,
"Bringing the City Back to Life;' with a cute, cartoon painting of two
decaying, black row, townhouses juxtaposed with two Victorian, re-
vamped, high-style versions. The inside cover story is titled "Spiffing up
the Urban Heritage;' under the statement that "After years of neglect,
Americans lavish love and sweat on old downtowns" - the return, from
suburbia, to the downtown as small town. "How did Americans manage
to forget for so many years that downtowns are invigorating and old cities
grand ... the nation has had a great change of heart" [po 72]. Not eco-
nomics [or politics] and perhaps displacement of the poor but "a change of
heart;' the city as a site of upwardly mobile romance dependent on a lit-
eral erasure of poverty and race. Rather than dealing with the homeless
[and racism, the left-over of the 1950S emigration from cities to the sub-
urbs], we will redecorate the homes and reclaim the territory, without
compensation, like our methods with native Americans. The politics of
renovation/redecoration as a fashionable coverup, with restoration para-
doxically preserving history, the turn-of-the-century style, the original,
usually Victorian, while eradicating "modern" history, is more than trou-
blesome.)
The "art of straying" is the way of the lovers in Hiroshima Mon Amour,
wandering through the cafe streets of Hiroshima and the paths of their
mutual desires. The French woman is the traveler, making a peace film;
the Japanese man is an inhabitant of Hiroshima; trying to find each other /
avoid each other, they speak of history, of person, of otherness. In the
famous opening scene, their bodies form a topography of desire, of glis-
tening catastrophe. "Who are you? You destroy me. How could I have
known that this city was made to the size of love? How could I have
known that you were made to the size of my body?" (Duras 1961, 25).
Newsreels of the atomic bomb's victims, tourist monuments, Peace
Square, and a busload of Japanese tourists are intercut; place and history
are personal and impersonal. She has seen the tourists' view of Hiroshima
and catastrophe; he insists that she has seen nothing, that she knows noth-
ing. "No, you don't have a memory" (p. 23). Knowledge is inextricable
from memory, from lived experience, as is history. The film then precipi-
tates the memory of her history, France's cultural history, women's his-
60 PATRICIA MELLEN CAMP

tory - her humiliation, her victimization for desire, loving a German sol-
dier, in Nevers. It concludes with these remarks in the screenplay. "He
looks at her, she at him, as she would look at the city... :' "Hi-ro-shi-ma
... that's your name:' He: "That's my name. Yes. Your name is Nevers.
Ne-vers in France" (p. 83). Cities, proper names and sites of enunciation,
are lived places of memory, spaces for history, love, and desire - for
women travelers as well as men.
In an uncannily direct way, the film documents de Certeau's claim that
"The concept-city is decaying .... The ministers of knowledge have
always assumed that the whole universe was threatened by the very
changes that affected their ... positions. They transmute the misfortune
of their theories into theories of misfortune . . . they transform their
bewilderment into 'catastrophes' ... they seek to enclose the people in
the 'panic' of their discourses" (De Certeau 1984,96). De Certeau suggests
a way out of catastrophe; his Diogenes is Michel Foucault: "one can ana-
lyze the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic
system was supposed to administer or suppress ... follow[ing] the
swarming activity of ... everyday regulations and surreptitious creativi-
ties that are merely concealed by the ... discourses of ... organization"
(De Certeau 1984, 96). For him, in the footsteps of Foucault, who was
looking for a "theory of everyday practices, of lived space;' and like Ben-
jamin strolling and remembering history in the present, the scholarly and
creative act is that of passing by, the operation of walking, wandering -
the art of the strayer and consummate stylist.
(A parenthetical detour leads me wildly astray - perhaps flying off to
another country or essay. I question de Certeau's tinge of nostalgia, as well
as a politics of space which doesn't include the twentieth-century determi-
nant of time. Some of us might be driving rapidly in cities, on crowded
freeways, or flying from airport to airport, vague and similar networks
without borders or difference [a distillation of cultural differences into the
mass, institutional international airport style of bland sameness depicted
in Small World].
(Time dominates and narrates airports via the act of waiting and meet-
ing, punctuated by checking out the "times" which are electronically and
manually posted everywhere, now on banks of black-and-white TV moni-
tors like a costly, precious video installation piece at the Whitney Museum
of Art; the iconography is simple math, strings of disparate cities, repeti-
tively arranged in two categories which divide up the world with little rec-
LAST SEEN IN THE STREETS OF MODERNISM 6r

ognition or logic of space or specificity and which are difficult for the
onlooker to discern: arrivals and departures. Airports, like corridors, are
modern spaces of hasty passage [now adorned with high-tech neon or
other mural "art" to distract our nonmovement on the flat escalators on
which we do move forward but appear to be walking in place; we are
being moved and wonder whether we should move, too, held in a simula-
tion between active and passive], determined by regularity and forced
delay, the disruption of scheduled time by mechanical error [for which the
passengers are compensated] or the vagaries of the weather, nature [whose
foibles and cost we must bear, financially]. Time's extension and collapse
into international, standardized time zones traverses night and day
marked only by food - if it's breakfast, it must be morning and time to
chat. Passengers dash to distanced terminals, burdened by luggage and
.resentful of the long walks in architecture which has ignored the crowd,
the pedestrian on the ground; the plane is the destination, the port a place
of impermanence, of passage with microwave food stands of high-priced
junk food, pockets of idle chatter but no conversation, the confusion of
direction, the scrambling of destination. We are unable to tell arrivees
from departees, beginnings from endings; the vectors are rhomboid, going
off in all directions, like the airline maps in on-flight magazines; corporate
terrain is not clear, not determined any longer by place [American used to
be just that; Pan American flew to South America; Trans World did just
what its name implied - there was a territory, a spatial plan; now there
are cat's cradle graphs which all overlap]; there is no narrative other than
coming or going, either here or there, no public identity [and hence little
privilege or class, with the exception of first-class and executive lounges],
no nationality, only the mission, goal, and life-and-death desire of being
"on time" but feeling timeless, contextless, unmoored but safe in this ano-
nymity of suspended time; how many days have you "lost" by traveling, a
true waste of time.
(Thus the commandeering of tourists by terrorists, the taking of travel-
ers from their unseen anonymity into context and history, struggle and
cultural difference - turning the national into the international which air-
ports already are - randomly transforms passengers into bystanders, par-
tisans, characters in a political drama, witnesses of confrontation and
negotiation. Hostages embody the nightmare of waiting or being trapped
in airports and airplanes, our fears of death in flight, as well as the risk of
live theater. Yet unlike the touristic threat portrayed again and again by
 PATRICIA MELLENCAMP

Hitchcock, these are dramas of time more than space, hence suitable to TV
special event coverage rather than cinema, which is quintessentially [but
not solely] a medium of space. The horror is being trapped, together, for
days rather than hours in the enclosed, claustropic plane [an inside, con-
fined terror which on TV we can only imagine, but on film would become
the scene which would be boring, like waiting for a plane is anxious bore-
dom], or meeting someone at a plane which is delayed or does not arrive.
Hostage dramas thus represent not the complexity of the political issues,
but images of waiting and entrapment - the very experience or paradox
of flight and temporality. The random move from bored obscurity to dan-
gerous celebrity is a surrealist one: there is no reason for the selection of
hostages, determined only by destination and chance. The terror is the
missing cause-effect logic including names which television, a medium
also obsessed with time rather than space, tries but inevitably fails to sup-
ply. Temporal disorientation amidst signs of efficient regularity and nor-
mality [sealed by tailored uniforms of employees who rarely freak out and
who are not in a hurry - for them, the airport and the place are work-
places, a job, a very different experiential temporality] is the experience of
time travel - jet lag reminds us of the real effects; the suspension of time
becomes the substance of hostage coverage. Like passengers and their
families, TV waits, counting time against death threats.
(Yet, commercial TV - so in chronotopic sync with airports - flowing
forth from little sets mounted on individual chairs, with slots for quarters
of time, is anomalous in those spaces; perhaps "watching" TV is too active
for, or repetitive of, this enforced passivity of waiting [one of the best
places, along with libraries, to watch people read is at the airport]; or air-
port time misregisters with TV time, one obsession cancelling out or mag-
nifying the other. However, while commercial TV seems out of place,
either old-fashioned or too complexly fragmented or too embarrassing to
watch in public unlike legit reading no matter how pulpy, at the airport,
TV is everywhere, monitoring time, surveying our bodies, x-raying our lin-
gerie and birth-control devices, and recording our automobile license
plates outside the parking structure. We literally watch time on banks of
television monitors while discretely mounted surveillance cameras moni-
tor our view and every move, "security" measures which will protect us
from terrorist acts; we might feel safe in the crowd of imagined obscurity,
but we have appeared and been recorded on television, like all the other
hostages yet not broadcast on the nightly news.)
LAST SEEN IN THE STREETS OF MODERNISM

In Hiroshima Mon Amour, the lovers walk away and toward each
other, their wandering the enunciation of desire. De Certeau might assess
that the museum, Peace Square, the newsreel footage, and the guided
tourists have the status of the "proper meaning" of grammar - it is a pro-
duced fiction. Theirs (urbanists and architects) is the image of a "coherent
and totalizing space." Against this official rendering is the space and mem-
ory of the lovers: "the pedestrian walker" tells a "story jerry built ...
from common sayings, an allusive and fragmentary story whose gaps
mesh with the social practices it symbolizes:' The fit of this chapter to the
film is almost too perfect. As if analyzing the film, he writes: "To walk is
to lack a place:' As if writing an epigram for the film: "Memory is a sort of
anti-museum; it is not localizable" (De Certeau I984, IOO, I02-I03, I05).
For de Certeau, like the woman from Nevers and perhaps Norbert
Hanhold, travel "produce[s] 'an exploration of the deserted places of my
memory; the return to nearby exoticism by way of a detour through dis-
tant places and the 'discovery' of relics and legends .... Haunted places
are the only ones people can live in:' Like Benjamin, travel involves a
return to childhood - "to be other and to move toward the other" (De
Certeau I984, Io6-I08, no). Unfortunately, for both writers, "walking" is
moving away from the mother, a game of Fort da! De Certeau's conclu-
sion (the royal road named Lacan), like Benjamin's "syphilis" and jabbing
denigrations of his mother, was unexpected, a letdown. While women
travelers have come at least some distance - just before the end, de Cer-
teau (I984, I09) says that this experience will be different for "the female
foetus . . . introduced into another relationship to space" - Barthes
might be right: to write, for men, involves the body of "the Mother:'2 If
one can live through this separation (Barthes could not), then one comes
out siding with the father, like Benjamin. In de Certeau's account, women
are still unborn.
I want to step up the pace and fast forward into I987 in which the
dream woman of modernism's city returns as a feminist monster - Nor-
man Bates's knife-wielding mother incarnate. In Fatal Attraction, Psyche
or the sexual woman of the city, the working, successful, glamorous
woman living in her dark loft-lair above hellish red fires in Soho, guarded
by street-people Charons, is fatal. Set against this demon is the soft-focus
wife-mother, a compliant, quiet woman of the countrified suburbs of New
York.
Replaying the city / sex-country / family dichotomy (for working wom-
 PATRICIA MELLENCAMP

en, an ominous containment) Baby Boom (predicated on an unabashed

biological "maternal instinct") takes the successful executive working
woman out of the city of high-tec condo dec into the country and mother-
hood of overstuffed chintz and early American farm home, proving that
Tammy or Loretta or Dolly is right: you can't take the country out of the
girl. While motherhood appears to be the issue, fatherhood is the real tra-
jectory of the film; the little girl is literally handed over to the country vet,
Sam Shephard, the city writer of transient motels, in the film to prove the
old adage that women want to be royally screwed but don't know it. The
country becomes the place of free laissez-faire capitalism and all-night
rather than twenty-second sex. Like Fatal Attraction, the country is
reserved for nuclear families, the proper place to raise adorable little girls
- taken away from the goals and possibilities of cities and jobs at an ear-
lyage.
Women's success and accomplishments in the proverbial city provoke
gross, hysterical fear - witness the comic overkill of the ending of Fatal
Attraction. The films could be read as economic signposts - of recession,
a declining job market; covered over by fear of AIDS arguments and images
of the "successful" female executive, both films are reminiscent of post-
World War II. The massive ego involved in Fatal Attraction's premise that
this city woman would obsessively desire this boring man is, to me, un-
imaginable. The real boom is in the rediscovery of sweet mothers and little
daughters; this scenario is replayed in Slam Dancing; one night of sex with
a seductive blonde, like Fatal Attraction, has necessitated a nightmare of
male masochism; after the cartoonist's grueling ordeal, the family is
restored. (The truly interesting story buried in this film is the surrounding
sex scandal and the lesbian relationship of Bobbie Nye and the blonde.)
But there is a happier ending to my meanderings - memories of films
that escape the mastery of the city and the romanticism of the country. In
Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Die/man, the protagonist, the mature, moth-
erly but glamorous prostitute of modernism's dreams, remains within the
dailiness of her home, quietly servicing her clients and performing routine
chores - a feminist tour de force of formalism. This is a story seen from
the point of view of Zobeide's imaginary woman. This film is about her
existence in the city and her vengeance on her entrapment. While the
film's style is modernist, its conclusion is a shocker; she refuses to be pas-
sive victim and murders a client. Women's rage is very real.
In Sally Potter's The Gold Diggers, Celeste and Ruby, chased through
LAST SEEN IN THE STREETS OF MODERNISM

the labyrinthian streets by an anonymous gang of business-suited men, or

Keystone terrorists/ accountants, conquer the streets and outwit their pur-
suers, rescued by women, and join together in the end. Potter has picked
up where Ariadne left off: "The identificatory thread - I think of Ariadne
and the Labyrinth - is not along the lines of the human being providing a
model ... but rather an identification with ... arguments and ideas
... an intellectual identification" (Cook 1984, 20). Like Delphine Seyrig
in Jeanne Dielman, Julie Christie has played the idealized woman as the
repository of male desire. Here, like Seyrig, she turns the tables. Her
Ariadne is a black woman who has no interest whatever in various incar-
nations of Theseus.
Yvonne Rainer's The Man Who Envied Women, a great subtitle which
summarizes this argument, is punctuated by energetic scenes grabbed
from New York streets. After telescopic, kaleidoscopic shots of crowds,
the images focus on women walking and talking. These women are not
being pursued, nor are they trailing behind. They are walking confidently,
with assertiveness and style, together. Closer shots center on various pairs
of women; we hear their words, the sound, like the image, coming into
clear and comic focus. As they stride with sure awareness, they drop one-
liners, make puns. They are telling jokes, sometimes about men, and they
are laughing. This film is not a dream. This film is my experience.

Patricia Mellencamp is an associate professor in the Department of Art History at

the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the co-editor of Cinema and Lan-
guage and Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism. Her essays on video, tele-
vision, and independent film have appeared in Screen, Afterimage, and Enclitic.
66 PATRICIA MELLENCAMP

Notes and References

I.The tears and relief at the film's conclusion celebrate the restitution of the
patriarch, George Bailey, to his central role in the family and the town. Stewart
towers over the other characters and is given center-frame and intercut close-ups;
citizens, all very much shorter, observed from Stewart's point of view, like sup-
pliants, pay tribute to him. It is the hero's obsessive need for acclaim and verbal
recognition that marks so many of Capra's male-identity-crisis films.
2. Barthes's "meditation" on mother culminates in Camera Lucida.

Benjamin, Walter
I986a "A Berlin Chronicle;' in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiogra-
phy Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken.
I986b "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century;' in Reflections: Essays, Aph-
orisms, Autobiography Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York:
Schocken.
Bullfinch, Thomas
I959 Mythology. New York: Dell Publishing.
Cook, Pam
I984 "The Gold Diggers: Interview with Sally Potter;' Framework, 24
(spring):2o.
De Certeau, Michel
I984 The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall. Los Angeles: Uni-
versity of California Press.
De Lauretis, Teresa
I983 "From a Dream of Woman;' in Cinema and Language. Frederick,
Maryland: University Publications.
Duras, Marguerite
I96I Hiroshima Mon Amour, trans. Richard Seaver. New York: Grove Press.
Eco, Umberto
I983 Postscript to The Name of the Rose. New York: Harcourt, Brace,
Jovanovich.
Freud, Sigmund
I956 Delusion and Dream. Boston: Beacon Press.
LAST SEEN IN THE STREETS OF MODERNISM

Huyssen, Andreas
1986 "Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other;' in Studies in Entertain-
ment. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Lodge, David
1984 Small World. New York: Warners Books.

Morris, Meaghan
n.d. "At Henry Parkes Motel:' Unpublished manuscript (forthcoming from
Indiana University Press; a version is available in the Center for Twenti-
eth Century Studies "Working Papers:'

Petro, Patrice
1987 "Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar
Germany;' Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa (forthcoming from Princeton
University Press).
 Attitudes Toward Tokyo On Film

DON ALD RICHIE

The metropolis of Tokyo was like an ocean.

There were a limitless number of villages. These
villages and their people all appear identical. So
no matter how far you walk you seem to remain
where you started, going nowhere at all. And
wherever you are in Tokyo you lose your way.
KOBO ABE (Shinda musume ga utatta, 1954)

THE CITY on film has a long history, as do changing attitudes toward it.
This is as true for Tokyo on film as it is for New York, London, or Paris.
At the same time, however, national attitudes are usually different from
each other. Hence, this paper will consider Japanese attitudes in compari-
son with those of the West.
Originally, of course, in all countries, it was the city which was the pri-
mary subject of the infant cinema. The Lumiere views of Paris and those
of anonymous movie cameramen of Tokyo's Shimbashi are identical. The
city is the spectacle and consequently the cityscape is shown rather than
the countryside.
And shown, initially, only to city dwellers. The earliest theaters were in
the city, and it was only later that towns and villages got theirs. People
went to the little theater next to the big train station to see a short film
about a train pulling into the station.
The theme of the city was so taken for granted in this very early cinema
that no attitude at all toward the subject is to be discerned. The city was
there to be photographed and looked at - like a forest fire or a naval
battle.
Once movies started being shown in the provincial capitals, and then in
smaller towns and villages, however, an attitude evolved. The city became
visible as a theme.

68
ATTITUDES TOWARD TOKYO ON FILM

In the West, the earliest reading of the city as theme saw it as a place of
promise, where one went to make one's fortune. In early story-films, pre-
dominantly in the United States but in Europe as well, the city was seen as
home of wealth and consequently culture. The manners of the country
were seen as provincial, and loutishness became a favorite comic theme.
At the conclusions of such pictures it was common to see the bucolic
young couple setting off for the city all smiles at the prospect. Often
indeed they set off walking, since this made a better pictorial effect.
Though Japanese cinema early imitated the American, this reading of
the city as promise had no place in the early Japanese story-films. The city
was often enough shown, but a division between city and country was not
indicated - though it later would be.
The reason, perhaps, was that Japan already had an attitude so persua-
sive that such dichotomies between city and country, and the attaching of
qualities to both, were understandably late in beginning. This was (and is)
the Japanese insistence upon the primacy of the /urusato, the hometown.
In Japan a mystique is given this location which is much stronger and
more persuasive than anything an American or German or Italian might
feel about the town in which he happened to have been born. In the West
such regard (and such resultant films) are usually dismissed as senti-
mental.
Not in Japan. The early cinema was filled with celebrations of life in the
/urusato and a consequent anguish experienced when separated from it.
This was the initial reading of the city theme in Japanese cinema and was
so for a time to remain. One might mention two films by Kenji Mizoguchi
actually named Furusato. The latter (I929) was a talkie, starred the tenor
Yoshie Fujiwara, and featured a song about these singular small-town vir-
tues.
This theme continues even now. Certainly one of the reasons for the
success of Yoji Yamada's Tora-san series is that the lovable hick after all
sorts of big-city adventures always returns to his hometown, little Shiba-
mata. This is pictured as a place that may have had some existence in the
I960s when the series began but that is in the late I980s pure film set.
Always romantic, the Tora-san series has now become historical fiction.
Nonetheless, many Japanese still subscribe to the myth of hometown
where everything was good, where people were nice, where things were,
somehow, much better than elsewhere.
Elsewhere was early defined in Japan. It was the city. Originally it was
 DONALD RICHIE

not that the city was bad, it was simply that it was urban and conse-
quently small-town virtues could not exist in it. That these films were
made during a time when the millions were first beginning to pour from
the Jurusato into the metropolis indicates nothing - except, of course,
that this hometown longing is something that the Japanese exhibit more
often and more readily than do other peoples.
The idyllic qualities of small-town life are seen in the West mainly as
reflections of their lack in the big cities. After the initial view of the city as
promise came the opposite, though complementary, view of the city as
place of betrayal. The happy couple had walked into a scene of menace.
In many films the city was regarded with the most grave suspicions.
Lang's Metropolis (1926), Murnau's Sunrise (1927), and Vidor's The
Crowd (1928), among many other films, looked askance at the big city. It
was in popular cinema the home of the gold digger and the city slicker.
Innocent folks from the country (no longer seen as laughable bumpkins)
were here fleeced and sent back to where they came from sadder but wiser.
Just as Japan had no reason to glamorize the city (since it was glamoriz-
ing the Jurusato), it had no reason for denigrating the city. Nonetheless,
damnation makes for better drama than celebration and - following the
American example - the city was shortly being seen as a place of trauma.
After 1929 Mizoguchi dropped the Jurusato theme and was making
films about the disappointing city. Both Tokyo March (Tokyo koshinkyo-
ku) and Metropolitan Symphony (Tokai kokyogaku) were about the lives
of proletarian families of rural origin unable to make a living in the heart-
less capital. By the following year such films as Kiyohiko U shihara's The
Great Metropolis: Chapter on Labor (Daitokai rodohen) had deepened
and widened accusations of coldness and lack of fellow feeling.
Later, in the tradition of Bowery-based or Limehouse-set Western films,
Japanese were even discovering "dangerous" sections in Tokyo itself,
always the safest of cities. One such was the later but typical Lights oj
Asakusa (Asakusa no hi), directed by Yasujiro Shimazu in 1937. Here the
old section of Tokyo is seen as home of the "criminal:'
In the same year, Tomu Uchida made The Naked Town (Hadaka no
machi), in which the city conspires to beat down a good man. He acts as
guarantor to a bad friend, then must go to the moneylender, and from
then on tumbles to the depths. At one point, even his cat (city bred, no
doubt) refuses the milk he went to some lengths to obtain.
In the better Japanese films about cities the theme is not so much what
ATTITUDES TOWARD TOKYO ON FILM 7I
the city is as what it isn't. In Ozu's The Only Son (Hitori musuko), a I936
picture, the mother works hard so that her child can go to Tokyo and
make something of himself. She is later invited to visit. The stay is not a
happy occasion. Both he and his wife make only just enough money -
they are cut off from communal life. This is not claimed as the fault of the
city, but there is nevertheless the implication that the city is less caring,
indeed less human than the town from which he came. It is not the fault of
the city, but nonetheless the city is seen as no proper place to live.
This attitude is one often seen in the films of Ozu. Its major statement is
in the I953 Tokyo Story (TOkyo monogatari), where the city is contrasted
with the town (Onomichi, a port on the Inland Sea) and found wanting.
There is the suggestion that the children's selfishness might have some-
thing to do with their living in a metropolis. After all, the story of the con-
sequences of this coldness is called Tokyo Story.
In Ozu's later statement on big-city life, the I956 Early Spring (Soshun),
the young couple is seen at the end going off to live in the country (he has
been transferred), and this constitutes an indication that their marriage
may now be saved, since it will no longer be subjected to urban stresses.
Just what these consist of is seen in the opening sequence of the film,
which shows people moving from the distant suburbs to their work in the
city. At first there are only one or two persons catching their trains at rural
stations. Soon, however, these numbers grow, the various trains grow
crowded, then packed. When the passengers are disgorged at Tokyo Sta-
tion they are anonymous, faceless - an impression that Ozu intensifies by
shooting the final scenes of this opening sequence from high up, reducing
the workbound people to the size - and status - of insects.
The people, it will be noted, were human enough when they left the
suburbs. This is because in Tokyo - as in London and New York - these
are viewed as a kind of buffer zone between the hometown and the city.
Ozu seems to have found them this - he lived his adult life in the suburbs
of Kamakura. And even now a majority of Tokyo workers are happy to
commute enormous distances daily so that they can have a bit of the coun-
try, a sort offurusato.
Heinosuke Gosho's I93I The Neighbor's Wife and Mine (Madamu to
nyobo), Japan's first talkie, is about the suburbs. A philandering husband
contemplates adventures with the vamp next door, something that would
not have been allowed in the hometown and would have been thought
much too dangerous in the big city. In Ozu's I932 I Was Born, But . ..
 DONALD RICHIE

(Umareta wa mita keredo) the trouble in the office worker's new home in
the suburbs is caused by conditions in his office in Tokyo. In its 1958
"remake;' Good Morning (Ohayo), we are again in the safe suburbs, and
the problem is that big-city presence, TV.
Later films about the suburbs, however, seem to have indicated that (on
film at any rate) the city infects as it grows. The 1957 Candle in the Wind
(Fuzen no tomoshibi) of Keisuke Kinoshita shows the suburbs as home of
avarice and violence. In Susumu Hani's 1963 She and He (Kanojo to kare)
the suburbs are seen as mere anteroom to the city, a place almost as cold
and impersonal as the metropolis itself is thought to be.
Still, japan has never had a genre of suburban films as devastatingly
detailed as those of the American Peyton Place variety. Perhaps one of the
reasons for this was that city-as-villain was never as strong a theme as it
was in the United States - ending there with the full horror of Soylent
Green, Escape from New York, and Blade Runner.
In japan it was not city-as-villain so much as it was life-as-villain, and
life can be awful just anywhere, even in the furusato. And it is indicative
that japan almost alone has a rehabilitating city-film genre, one that
attempts to find hometown-like qualities in the heart of the city itself.
Kurosawa's 1947 One Wonderful Sunday (Subarashiki nichiyobi), for
example, is about a poor young couple in Tokyo who one Sunday con-
struct an urban furusato for themselves. Gosho's 1953 From Where Chim-
neys Are Seen (Entotsu 0 mieru basho), is about a realfurusato right in the
heart of the city, as is, in a way, Kurosawa's Drunken Angel (Yoidore ten-
shi). This 1948 film even has its small-town figures: the doctor, the young
gangster, the tubercular schoolgirl, and so on.
One of the reasons that such a genre is possible is that Tokyo is actually
in its construction more a collection of small towns, or neighborhoods,
than it is big, hard-core city. It is not centralized, there is no good and bad
side of the tracks, no zoning, no real slums. Rather, it is a series of vil-
lages, each with its identical parts - supermarket, beauty parlor, sushi
shop, and so forth. Consequently Tokyo is, indeed, not a cold or heartless
city at all, at least by comparison with, let us say, Paris. Yet, big-cityitis
threatens.
Hence a theme often seen in japan's city films is the change from warm,
accepting city unit into cold, aloof big city proper. In Kurosawa's 1952
Ikiru it is the city government itself which is the villain. The dying Kanji
Watanabe wants to make a warm, living, small-townlike children's park, a
ATTITUDES TOWARD TOKYO ON FILM 73

Jurusato for the neighborhood children, and eventually he succeeds in

doing so.
In Yasuki Chiba's I957 Downtown (Shitamachi) the poor widow finds a
warm hometown-like friend in the truck driver, but it is the cruel city that
kills him. In Mikio Naruse's I960 Flowing (Nagareru), the little town of
the geisha in the middle of modern Tokyo is going to be destroyed after the
film is over - yet one more living unity rendered lifeless.
It is not so much that the city is bad. Rather, the danger is always that
the little-towns of which the city is made will be crushed to death, exter-
minated by this tremendous accumulation of people.
In the West, of course, the city is bad because it really is. Most Ameri-
can cities and many in Europe are truly dangerous. A film like The French
Connection is only showing it as it happens to be. Thus when cities in the
West get destroyed it is usually because they deserve it.
Tokyo has been destroyed on film any number of times, but never, I
believe, because it deserved to be. Usually, Tokyo seems chosen for earth-
quake or fire or monster-attack simply because this is a place where the
most people can be gratifyingly gotten rid of. This highly pragmatic atti-
tude does have, however, further dimensions.
From Codzilla (Cojira, I954) on, the attacker is, whatever else,
uniquely Japanese. Though this particular monster was awakened by the
I953 u.s. atom bomb tests at Bikini, he is nonetheless Japanese in that he
was sleeping in his own Jurusato in Tokyo Bay (to where he in true Japa-
nese fashion returns at the end of the picture). Though he may destroy
other cities - Osaka and Fukuoka in later films - he has never touched
Kyoto, Japan's official Jurusato. And in his latest (I984) appearance it is
no longer the historical downtown of Tokyo that he pulverizes, but the
new skyscrapers in Shinjuku. Godzilla has become conservative, which is
very Japanese of him.
Even so, the civic destruction wrought by monsters, by alien invasions,
by mysterious clouds, by earthquakes, and by conflagrations (all of them
disasters to which Tokyo on film has been treated) are never occasioned by
anything specific about Tokyo itself. Rather, in a country that is always
being shaken by earth tremors and visited by typhoons, full disaster seems
a part of the climate and is not used - as it is in the West - to make moral
observations.
It is interesting that when Westerners use Tokyo in their films they bring
along their moral conceptions. Samuel Fuller in his I955 House oj Bamboo
74 DONALD RICHIE

found Tokyo's innocent Asakusa to be a home of oriental evil. Chris

Marker, on the other hand, in films such as Le Mystere Koumiko and Sans
Soleil, finds Tokyo filled with a charm and a beauty that are purely Pari-
sian. Also, Tokyo's size, relentless modernity, and resolute artificially
made it the model for the Los Angeles of the future in Blade Runner. How-
ever, Ridley Scott made all of this malign - his own contribution. Actu-
ally, modern Tokyo is as benign as the Disneyland it has now come to
resemble.
One further singularity about Tokyo on film might be noted in this brief
listing of attitudes. This is that, unlike all other major cities, Tokyo is itself
very rarely seen in the films, that is, location-work in Tokyo is very rare. If
one sees a crew on the street, one may be fairly certain they are making
something for TV.
Among the reasons might be that Tokyo itself, as many have noticed,
looks just like a film set. The Tokyo street photographed in a film looks
somewhat unreal. More real looking were those sections of Tokyo - "the
Ginza;' "a Shinjuku alley;' "an apartment house" - that one used to find
in the open sets of the major motion picture studios.
Indeed, the few times that Tokyo has actually been used as setting, Su-
sumu Hani's The Inferno of First Love (Hatsukoi jigokuhen, I968) and
Nagisa Oshima's The Man Who Left His Will On Film (TOkyo senso
sengo hiwa, I970) as well as portions of his Diary of a Shinjuku Thief
(Shinjuku dorobo nikki, I969), the theme has been the artificiality of mod-
ern life and the anonymity of Tokyo itself.
Another reason for Tokyo itself so rarely appearing in films about
Tokyo is that reality (at least in Japan) is so much better contrived and
controlled on the sound stage. Kurosawa's wonderfully detailed and mer-
cilessly hot Tokyo in A Record of a Living Being (Ikimono no kiroku, I955)
is all studio set. So are the ruins of Tokyo in The Bad Sleep Well (Warui
yatsu hodo yoku nemuru, I96o).
All of Ozu's beautiful little Tokyo streets, all of the intimate bars, all of
the offices and sitting rooms and kitchens - these are movie sets. Actually
Tokyo is sometimes to be seen between them, however. When Noriko
takes the old couple on a tour of Tokyo in Tokyo Story, it is the real Tokyo
we see; when father and daughter take the suburban train in Late Spring
(Banshun, I949) from Kamakura to Tokyo, it is the actual progression of
that journey which we see in the picture.
Attitudes toward Tokyo on film remain constant, but as the city prolif-
ATTITUDES TOWARD TOKYO ON FILM 75

erates, as land grows daily more expensive, as the suburbs press further
out, there are new numbers of films that continue to question urban life -
films such as Shinji Somai's Luminous Woman (Hikari onna, I987), which
has a noble savage from Hokkaido coming to rescue the Tokyo-stranded
heroine. At the end he carries her back to an idyllic furusato where the
rabbits and the foxes play happily in the grassy lawns of the couple's
house in the country. And, of course, Tora-san continues to be as popular
as he ever was.
The attitude toward Tokyo as seen in the film is one much more benign
than are the various attitudes shown by other countries toward other
world capitals, but at the same time, the evidence is that of disapproval.
Though there is no reason for a reading of city-as-hell, there also exists no
reading of Tokyo as city-as-heaven, which is odd when one considers that
it is thefurusato for millions.

Donald Richie, former curator of film at The Museum of Modern Art in New
York, is widely known for his works on the Japanese film. He also writes of many
other facets of the country, however. His most recent work is Different People:
Pictures of Some Japanese (Kodansha International).
 Chinese Urban Cinema:
Hyper-realism Versus Absurdism

CHRIS BERRY

UNTIL recent years, the cinema of the People's Republic of China was
marked by an amazing uniformity of style equal to that of the classic Hol-
lywood cinema in history and ubiquity. With the emergence of two
younger, post "cultural revolution" generations of filmmakers, all that has
changed. Distinctive styles have become associated with individual direc-
tors, cameramen, and genres. In the case of urban subject matter, two
directors have marked themselves out. One is Zhang Liang, from Pearl
River Film Studio. His enormously successful films have tended to what,
in the Chinese context, might be termed a sort of hyper-realism. The other
is Huang Jianxin, from China's most innovative studio, Xi'an. Huang's
expressionistic films have been spoken of as "absurdist" in China.
Although somewhat less successful at the box office than Zhang Liang's
films, their influence in the film industry itself has been enormous and
many urban films now bear their mark.
The traditional cinematic style against which Zhang Liang, Huang
Jianxin, and the majority of young and middle-aged Chinese directors are
trying to distinguish their works is the Chinese variant of socialist realism.
It is a didactic fusion of classic Hollywood filmmaking and Soviet Stalinist
style. I have already analyzed some of the cinematic characteristics of this
style (Berry 1985). Editing codes are similar to Hollywood's, but their rela-
tion to the representational level is different. Two shots are dominant,
with harmony and consensus signified by maintaining groups of charac-
ters or couples within the same frame. Shot reverse-shot tends to signify
the collapse of harmony.
This cinematic system meshes well with narrative structures in which
harmony and disharmony are expressed as separation and reunion. This is
the dominant narrative pattern in classic mainland Chinese cmema,
CHINESE URBAN CINEMA 77
whether the order of the day has been class struggle or "unity and stabil-
ity" as now. 1
On the representational level, the "realism" of the classic Chinese cin-
ema aims for typicality rather than naturalism. As an interpretation of the
didactic demands of the Yan'an Forum cultural policy that insists art is in
the service of politics, characters tend to minimal internal contradiction. 2
It is clear whom the audience should learn from and who is the enemy.
Other characteristics follow Hollywood. Interiors and many exteriors are
studio sets. Lighting is full, with speaking characters centered in the frame
and positioned so that their faces are clearly visible to the audience. Cos-
tumes and sets themselves are usually a cleaned-up, in-style version of
what members of the audience might like to recognize as their own lives.
The realism of Zhang Liang's Yamaha Fish Stall, made for Pearl River
Studio in I984, and Juvenile Delinquents, made for Shenzhen Film Corpo-
ration in I985, are strikingly different from traditional socialist realism.
As the first of the two films, Yamaha Fish Stall had a particularly strong
impact. The plot traces the efforts of a young Cantonese man to establish
a privately run fish stall with the help of two friends. The name derives
from the Yamaha motorcycle he uses to transport live fish back from the
docks. Just to get the business going, the three young friends have to pay
off petty officials and people with connections. These bad experiences
encourage them to move beyond fair competition whenever they run into
difficulties. Eventually this gets them into trouble. For example, when
they are unable to sell their stock one day, they decide to turn the dead fish
into fish balls. However, to stretch them out further, they make the fish
balls with enormous quantities of flour. In no time at all, they are sur-
rounded by a mob of angry customers. However, through these experi-
ences they come to understand that cooperation with other private busi-
nessmen and honesty help best to cushion against the insecurity of an
independent life outside the state system.
The three main characters of Yamaha Fish Stall are very far indeed from
traditional Chinese socialist realism. Private peddlers are hardly typical
"cultural revolution" heroes, nor are they even the modern-day equivalent
of the politically upright brigade leaders and barefoot doctors who popu-
lated these films. (This role has fallen to efficiency- and profit-minded
state enterprise managers in the "reform" genre.) In fact, private business-
men have a rather unsavory reputation in China today, and the antics of
the characters in the movie further confirm an ambiguity of characteriza-
 CHRIS BERRY

tion that marks this realism out as something different. The naturalistic
effect of these characters is enhanced further by the casting of people who
were unknowns or even amateurs at the time in the main roles.
At least as important as the characterization and casting are the set-
tings. Probably 70 or 80 percent of the film takes place in the open air: in
the markets, on the streets, at the docks, and even on a floating restau-
rant. Many of the interiors are commercial rather than domestic. These
include teahouses, coffee shops, dance halls, and even a barber shop. The
masses of people milling around in the background of all these scenes and
the dense traffic in the street scenes help to signify not only location shoot-
ing but also settings that are unorganized, unrehearsed, and thus some-
how more "real" than the studio sets of socialist realism. Even the clutter
and dilapidation of the domestic interiors add to this effect. Zhang Liang
is careful to avoid "impossible" camera positions in these scenes, and so it
becomes unclear whether these are carefully naturalized studio sets or
locations.
Additional techniques add to and even draw attention to the "realism"
of these settings. The techniques signify "realism" by virtue of their differ-
ence from traditional socialist realist techniques, as does the use of clut-
tered locations as opposed to organized studio sets itself. Artificial light-
ing, if used, is low-key and motivated. Main characters are often partly in
shadow. For example, when the rival woman stallholder speaks the first
dialogue in the film, she is centered and facing the camera, but she is in the
shade of the stall itself while the backs of the people between her and the
camera are brightly lit, at least apparently by sunlight.
The scenes in large public places also contain cutaway shots that are
totally unmotivated by the plot. For example, in the teahouse, when the
would-be young stallholders are treating a local big-wig to dim sum in an
attempt to get a trading license, there are shots of old men eating their
snacks and reading their newspapers, apparently unaware that they are
being observed by the camera. When the hero makes his first fish-buying
trip to the docks, again there are cutaways to trading and unloading
scenes on the docks. Apart from building "atmosphere;' these shots func-
tion to draw attention to the realism of the film. It is for these attention-
seeking qualities that I would like to refer to Zhang Liang's comparatively
naturalistic realism as a sort of hyper-realism.
Juvenile Delinquents continues many of the tendencies of Yamaha Fish
Stall. As the title suggests, it examines the world of young criminals. A
CHINESE URBAN CINEMA 79
middle-aged woman reporter decides to make an extended VISIt to a
reform school to research an article she intends to write. The longer she
stays at the school, the more involved she becomes with certain cases,
working with warders in their efforts to reform the young criminals. As
time goes by, she neglects her own son and comes home only to find the
police hauling him off.
I cannot claim that Juvenile Delinquents uses its settings to signify real-
ism in the same way as Yamaha Fish Stall does. Most of the action takes
place in a reformatory. This is an interior location not much different
from those used in traditional films. It lacks the power to signify a differ-
ent realism in the way the crowded streets of Guangzhou do. Further-
more, not many of us are familiar enough with such a place to judge the
mimetic qualities of the institution and studio sets used in the film.
Characterization is the mainstay of realism in this film. Underage law-
breakers are even further from the traditional socialist realist hero than
private peddlers. The journalist's character seems a cipher at first and then
an embodiment of maternal virtues in her growing concern for the
inmates. However, even she is made highly ambiguous by the final arrest
of her son, which throws into question her responsibility as a parent. This
is further underlined by the fact that the delinquency of various inmates
has been traced back to poor upbringing in the course of the film.
The attention-grabbing, hyper-real aspect of Juvenile Delinquents lies
not in the text itself, but in the casting. As advance publicity made sure
every filmgoer in China knew, all the inmates in the movie were played by
real juvenile delinquents. These lucky individuals were wheeled out for
every premiere of the film and given early parole or reduced sentences in
reward for good behavior during the shooting. When they were later suc-
cessively reported to have been arrested for committing crimes, this must
have only added further sensationalistic evidence of the new "realism" of
this film. These weren't "typical" juvenile delinquents; they were real juve-
nile delinquents.
Zhang Liang's hyper-realism is one of a number of new realist direc-
tions in Chinese cinema that have defined themselves by their difference
from traditional socialist realism. It is as part of this broad tendency that
his films must be understood. To give a precise account of the different
critical debates and films that have informed and composed this tendency
would probably take a book-length study. However, I would like to point
to one or two elements here.
80 CHRIS BERRY

First, why were new forms of realism necessary at all? The reasons for
this lie in the fall of the "Gang of Four" and the end of the "cultural revolu-
tion" period in 1976. With this event, all the films associated with the
period 1966 to 1976 immediately fell into disrepute. However, the Yanan
policy on culture continued to be applauded. Other policies and slogans
that had been espoused during the "cultural revolution" continued to be
cited with approval until at least 1979. For example, a volume detailing
the crimes of the "Gang of Four" in the film industry still speaks approv-
ingly of "the direction of art serving the workers, peasants and soldiers" in
1978 (Zheng and Ding 1978). (This triumvirate has since become a joke in
the recent film Ormosia Inn, where it is revealed that the old name of the
inn was "Worker-Peasant-Soldier Inn;' to the guffaws of all the Chinese
audiences I have seen it with.) Other slogans and policies current during
the "cultural revolution" still continue to this day. The date of Mao's
"Talks at the Yan'an Forum" is commemorated every year, and a popular
film award called The Hundred Flowers Award, after the cultural policy
of the same name, is awarded almost every year. "Realism" is still upheld
regularly in critical articles everywhere.
This situation has presented the Chinese film world with an interesting
problem. On the one hand, they are to repudiate "cultural revolution"
films totally. On the other hand, they must uphold the policies and slogans
such as the Yan'an Forum, the Hundred Flowers policy, and "realism;' in
the name of which these very films and indeed all other films produced
since 1949 were made. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the pronounce-
ments about the "cultural revolution" period made immediately after 1976
detailed plenty of malpractices and crimes, but spent little time analyzing
what was actually wrong with the films themselves. However, what little
space was devoted to the films themselves attacked them for a lack of
authenticity (Zheng and Ding 1978). A cultural policy particularly asso-
ciated with the "Gang of Four" led this attack to be concentrated on char-
acterization. This was the "Theory of the Three Prominences;' which
required that greatest prominence in a work of art be given to the purest,
most typical, and most heroic characters. At the same time as this policy
was being singled out for attack, famous films from the early 1960s which
featured more ambiguous "middle characters;' such as Early Spring in
February, were being rereleased. Articles also appeared regularly in the
professional press discussing the problem of remaining "gangness" in
characterization and how to make characters more complex, credible, and
"realistic:'
CHINESE URBAN CINEMA 81

However, a batch of urban films made by teachers at the Beijing Film

Academy and released in 1980 and 1981 suggests that the return to middle
characters alone did not prove enough to establish a realism profoundly
different from that of the "cultural revolution:' The revival of films from
the early 1960s indicates that because these films were condemned in the
"cultural revolution" it was thought that they had to be very different
from those of the "cultural revolution:' Yet I would suggest that different
though they might be, the two sets of movies are variations on the same
dominant socialist realist tradition. The basic characteristics described at
the beginning of this article can be found in both groups. However, my
interpretation here of the drive necessitating the emergence of further new
realist directions after 1980 must remain unsupported, if for no other rea-
son because political considerations preclude anyone in the People's
Republic agreeing to it for attribution.
The urban films that appeared in 1980 and 1981 were The Drive to Win
and Neighbors. The former was made by the woman film theorist and
director Zhang Nuanxin. The latter was directed by the current head of
the Beijing Film Academy Directing Department, Zheng Dongtian, and
Xu Guanrong. Neighbors was followed up by a very similar film called
Sunset Street, directed by Wang Haowei.
All three films make moves in the same naturalistic directions that
Zhang Liang's films take up later. The Drive to Win follows the ups and
downs of a female basketball player's career and personal life. Set in
crowded apartment blocks and at sports events, it features understated
lighting and occasional use of a hand-held camera. Unlike the carefully
organized drama of traditional socialist realist films, The Drive to Win is
designed to appear more spontaneous. Characters move in and out of
frame while they talk, and their dialogue sometimes overlaps. Both Neigh-
bors and Sunset Street are slice-of-life movies. One is set in a city apart-
ment block. The other is set in a small alley. Both accommodations are
due for demolition, and the inhabitants' everyday dramas are further com-
plicated by the prospect of the move. They feature crowded locations and
multiple plots with complex characters who are far from the typical
heroes of the past.
These films were the last major burst of realist innovation before Zhang
Liang's films first appeared. What remains to be explained is why both
Zhang Liang's films and these earlier films are urban in setting. Why have
cities been particularly associated with realist innovation over the last dec-
ade? I think the key to understanding this lies in realizing that these new
 CHRIS BERRY

realist directions are distinguished by their difference from traditional

socialist realism. Only shooting on city streets provides the crowds, the
play of shadow and light, and the speeding traffic in the background that
could never even be approximated in the studio settings of the past.
In fact, more and more rural films have also been shot on location over
the past ten years. However, the countryside simply doesn't provide scenes
that are so radically different from what can be simulated in a studio, and
so these films cannot signify their difference so well as urban ones do.
Peasants sitting around and talking in their houses can look much the
same as actors sitting around in a studio set. The slower pace of life
doesn't make overlapping dialogue and bustling movement so likely,
either. Only in one area have rural films been marked out for realist inno-
vations of their own. This is in the use of synch-sound as opposed to post-
dubbing, a practice first introduced in a major way in the award-winning
countryside film In the Wild Mountains in 1985. However, the countryside
was a more suitable location for this innovation precisely because it lacked
the complex and difficult hubbub of the city. Even though over 90 percent
of In the Wild Mountains was filmed with synch-sound on location,
because the background noise was limited and the dialogue measured, the
results are difficult to distinguish from a more traditional, post-dubbed
studio effort. Similarly, many rural films feature more complex, naturalis-
tic characterization than the typical heroes of the past. The main character
in Wu Tianming's film Life, made in 1984, is a good example. He pulls
strings and dumps his girlfriend, but all for reasons anyone could sympa-
thize with. However, without the other new realist elements made possible
by the urban settings in Zhang Liang's films, Life and other rural films do
not stand out as a new realism in the same way as Zhang Liang's urban
hyper-realism.
Huang Jianxin's urban films make an even more radical break from tra-
ditional socialist realist filmmaking than Zhang Liang's, and they move in
completely the opposite direction. Where Yamaha Fish Stall and Juvenile
Delinquents move toward a more naturalistic realism, Black Cannon Inci-
dent and Dislocation, made in 1985 and 1986, respectively, move away
from realism altogether. In China, they have been spoken of as "absurdist"
because of their plots, but the overall style of the films could also be said
to be "expressionistic:'
Black Cannon Incident gets its name from a Chinese chess piece called a
"black cannon:' Engineer Zhao Shuxin loses his black cannon on a busi-
CHINESE URBAN CINEMA

ness trip. When he cables back in an effort to retrieve it, the farcical or
"absurd" plot line begins. A telegram operator suspects a secret code.
Contacted by the police, the elderly woman Party vice-secretary at his
company begins to suspect him of engaging in industrial espionage with a
German engineer who had come to China to help install some imported
equipment. When the German returns, Zhao is given various excuses and
not allowed to work with him again. The German is furious because his
new translator lacks technical vocabulary. Various misunderstandings
ensue. By the time Zhao is cleared, the German has already left. Due to a
translation error made during Zhao's absence, an industrial breakdown
costing the company a large sum of money occurs.
The farcical or absurd character of this plot, where the logic of a small
misunderstanding is allowed to snowball to a devastating conclusion, is
clear enough. But what was even more remarkable than this already
revealing comedy was the expressionism of the film. Noticeably, however,
the expressionistic elements do not include characterization. Precisely
because of this, Black Cannon Incident can be said to be almost a reversal
of the Chinese socialist realist filmmaking tradition. The latter aimed at
some level of mimesis in settings, costumes, and so forth, but veered fur-
thest away from this in its use of "typical" characters which lacked the
contradictions perceived to exist in real-life people, especially during the
"cultural revolution" period. In Black Cannon Incident, on the other
hand, the settings, costumes, and use of color are very evidently not
mimetically motivated, but the characters are. They are all too full of con-
tradiction. No one appears as a pure expression of a certain moral line, or
as a perfect hero, or as a villain. Even lovable Zhao Shuxin, the engineer
who loses the chess piece, is clearly a fool not to stand up for himself or
even realize he is under investigation. As for the Party vice-secretary,
instinctively xenophobic as she is, her behavior is clearly the product of
her past training. It is made clear that she is acting out of a concern for
what she believes Zhao's best interests to be when she keeps him away
from the German; she doesn't want him to get into any more trouble than
he is in already.
The expressionistic elements in Black Cannon Incident combine to give
the film a decisively modern look. This look is modern in a way complete-
ly new to Chinese film. The urban setting does not simply help signify
~odernity. It is part and parcel of the qualities that compose the moder-
nity signified in the film. Black Cannon Incident is set in an unspecified
 CHRIS BERRY

city that does not correspond to any specific city outside the movie itself.
For the first time ever in a Chinese film, we get a city with no views of old
alleyways or old buildings. The only exception to this is a scene when
Zhao Shuxin visits a Christian church. Since his parents were Christians,
we can interpret this as a return to his past, a moment of review, reflec-
tion, and escape from the modern world. Significantly, this is also the only
moment in the film in which any significant stretch of green appears: a
park outside the church. Apart from this scene, the city appears as a new
town composed of modern hotels, high-tech factories, model housing
estates, a new airport, and so forth. This is a city of the present, a city
without a history.
However, the modern urban world of Black Cannon Incident is not the
paradise of modernity predicted in traditional socialist realist films from
the boy meets tractor dramas of the 1950S to today's "getting rich is glori-
ous" celebrations of rural prosperity. Certainly there is gleaming machin-
ery everywhere. But these machines are usually massive, noisy pieces of
equipment that dwarf human beings and drown out their conversations.
For example, there is the earthmover that roars past the Party vice-secre-
tary and the plant manager when they are discussing Zhao Shuxin's case
and envelops then in a cloud of dust.
The use of colors, settings, and camera work add to the overwhelming
aspect of modernity. Outside neutral earth tones and so forth, the pre-
dominant colors are red, white, and black. Gleaming red Japanese taxis
transport people in white shirts and black business suits around town. On
the whole, I do not think that specific, symbolic meaning is consistently
attached to these colors. Red does sometimes figure with conflict and
anger. The coffee bar where Zhao Shuxin and his German counterpart
have a major fight is decorated totally in bright red plastic. Even the wall
behind the stands at the football match which degenerates into a punch-up
is being painted red when the scene opens. But for the most part, these col-
ors simply signify an aggressive starkness that like the machines over-
whelms the individuals set against them. This is most vividly illustrated in
the repeated Party committee meeting scenes. Men and women dressed in
black and white file in and sit around a long white table in a white room
with white curtains. Dominating the entire scene is an enormous wall
clock in a modern design. Placed above the head of the table, its hands
and numerals are made of large chunks of black plastic. As decision after
decision cannot be made, time ticks visibly by. The camera maintains a
CHINESE URBAN CINEMA

relentlessly fixed confrontational position through much of these meet-

ings, recording the scene from a point perpendicular to the clock and the
head of the table. This confrontational positioning and lack of movement
are often found throughout the film and are as expressive as the colors and
the settings themselves. Part of this modernity, then, is an anomie similar
to that expressed in so much Western modern art produced in the indus-
trialized and urbanized societies of this century.
As the camera maintains a fixed position and the figures don't move
much in the committee meeting scenes, it is not surprising that these styl-
ized, almost-tableau shots take on the qualities of modern art. And indeed
modern art, with its connotations of sophistication and advancement, is
also one of the qualities of the modern sensibility produced in Black Can-
non Incident. The film is punctuated by montages of very abstract images
with no direct plot motivation, such as composites of an orange sun set-
ting in a red sky over a black silhouette of an industrial plant. These pro-
vide a space calling on the viewer to reflect on the rest of the film. It seems
to me their interpolative qualities are similar to those of much modern
abstract art. This reflection required of the audience is very different from
the didactic mode of traditional films. It is both a part of the total break
with the past that Black Cannon Incident makes and a part of the inte-
grated complex of urban life, modernity, anomie, expressionism, and
abstraction that makes the break possible.
Dislocation continues where Black Cannon Incident leaves off, in terms
of both plot and style. Zhao Shuxin has now become a bureau head in a
large high-tech concern. However, he faces a problem that besets all Chi-
nese people of position. There are so many meetings he must attend that
he can't get on with his research. To solve the problem, he builds a robot
indistinguishable from himself to attend the meetings in his place. As the
robot develops into a sort of id-on-the-loose, the plot develops along farci-
cal lines again, until Zhao Shuxin eventually has to destroy it.
Dislocation takes the modern look of Black Cannon Incident to new
heights. If industrial is the adjective that sums up the first film, high-tech
would be the word for Dislocation. Chrome, steel, and plastic in red,
black, and white are the order of the day again. Zhao Shuxin rarely goes
out of doors, and when he does it is usually in the black of night, where
restricted vision gives the world a stripped-down, abstract quality. Again,
abstraction and modernity are integrated with and expressed through the
urban environment constructed by the film.
86 CHRIS BERRY

Dislocation is not the only film to show the influence of Black Cannon
Incident. Zhang Liang's films are the latest in a series of realist innova-
tions, and therefore it would be difficult to trace any similar moves
directly to his films. But Black Cannon Incident was unique at the time of
its release, and so the same is not true. Its connotations of sophistication
have proved remarkably appealing. Quite a number of films bearing its
stamp have appeared in the last year or two. Although they are very vari-
ous, it is important to note that they all feature contemporary, modern,
urban settings. This confirms my thinking that the urban is an integral
and necessary part of the new style Huang Jianxin's films have carved out.
Sometimes, the influence of Black Cannon Incident can appear in rather
superficial ways. For example, there is the Changchun Film Studio pro-
duction, Strange Circle. A disappointingly regressive film, it starts with
the interesting premise of five unmarried women who set up an alternative
household together, cutting themselves off from the world of men. How-
ever, it rapidly proceeds to demonstrate that each of these women really
needs a man. The women all wear black. One of them gets involved with
an artist. They appear repeatedly in a shot that could have been lifted
directly out of Black Cannon Incident. The camera is fixed perpendicular
to a corrugated, bright red wall. A modern Japanese car is parked in front
of the wall. Dressed all in black, the women appear, get into the car, and
drive out of frame.
A more thoroughgoing instance is Questions For the Living, Huang
Jianzhong's outrageous and still-to-be-released new film. The plot is cer-
tainly "absurd;' A man is killed on a public bus. He comes back to life
and, accompanied by his girlfriend, goes to visit all the people who were
on the bus and asks them why they did nothing to help him. The hero is a
nebbish little man not unlike Zhao Shuxin of Black Cannon Incident. The
film is adapted from a modern stage play, and modernity in the Chinese
arts in the broadest possible sense is referenced throughout the film. The
hero paints modern art. Massive abstract paintings hang all over his walls.
He and his girlfriend act in a modern drama troupe. The film cuts away to
sections of modern drama and the primitive rituals that the Chinese mod-
ern movement, like its Western forerunner, draws upon. These punctuate
the film like the montages in Black Cannon Incident and also provide the
viewer with space to reflect on the film. The film is even the first in the
People's Republic to feature what many Chinese feel is the most modern of
the modern in modern art, nudity.
CHINESE URBAN CINEMA

In conclusion, what I hope I have demonstrated in both the cases of

Zhang Liang's and Huang Jianxin's films is that in the cinema of the Peo-
ple's Republic today, cities are not just something to be represented.
Rather their settings, the style of life in them, and the activities associated
with them from the economic to the cultural, have been necessary and
integral to the development of new cinematic tendencies. The combina-
tions of signification constituting different ideas of the urban are part of
the means by which Zhang Liang's hyper-realism and Huang Jianxin's
modern absurdism are distinguished from the socialist realist tradition.

Chris Berry, a specialist in Chinese cinema, is a member of the faculty of the

School of Humanities at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia.

Notes and References

I. This is discussed in further detail in Berry (1988).

2. Probably the most useful translation of Mao Zedong's "Yan'an Talks" is
McDougall (1980).

Berry, Chris
. 1985 "Sexual Difference and the Viewing Subject in Li Shuangshuang and
The In-Laws," in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, 32-47, ed. Chris
Berry. Cornell University East Asian Papers no. 39. Ithaca, New York:
Cornell University.
1988 "Chinese Women's Cinema Today;' Camera Obscura, no. 17.
McDougall, Bonnie S.
1980 Mao Zedong's "Talks at the Yan'an Conference on Literature and Art":
A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary. Michigan Papers in
Chinese Studies no. 39. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, Univer-
sity of Michigan.
Zheng Junxiang and Ding Qiao
1978 "Clarifying the Political Plot of the 'Gang of Four' to Make Anti-Party
Films;' in The "Gang of Four" are the Deadly Enemies of the Film
Industry. Beijing: China Film Press.
 The Rural Base of an Urban
Phenomenon

CHIDANANDA DAS GUPTA

WHEN Mahatma Gandhi went to London to the Round Table Confer-

ence in I93I to discuss India's future with the British government, he
caused a sensation by coming down from the ship wearing little more than
a loincloth. He had dressed in what the vast majority of the people he
represented could afford to wear. Later, asked if he hadn't been under-
dressed for an audience with the king, Gandhi replied: "He had enough on
for both of us:'
It is curious how well this image sat upon a man who had been edu-
cated in London as a barrister and came from a well-to-do merchant back-
ground. When he lived in a city, as he often did, he chose his dwelling
among the poor in the slums and from there carried on his dialogue with
the high and the mighty. There was no urban-rural divide in him. The fact
that his background was that of a city-dweller or that he dressed like a vil-
lager but spoke English perfectly, did not visit temples, and preached
against the caste system did not alienate him from either the rural popula-
tion or the urban. His doings in the city were seen by the villagers as the
labors of a leader of the country as a whole.
By and large, this was true of all the national leaders of the period
before India's independence in I947 and at least for a decade thereafter.
The city was not evil; it was, in fact, the place where the future of India
was being made. In Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy, the son of an impoverished
Brahmin family in a village moves first to the ancient city of Varanasi in
search of better times and then to the modern city of Calcutta to get him-
self educated. In Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadya's novel on which the trilogy
is based, Apu leaves his little son with relatives and goes off to Tahiti - a
long way from the village in which he had been born. The progression is
from the village to the city to the world - with hope. Satyajit Ray changed

88
THE RURAL BASE OF AN URBAN PHENOMENON

the ending; but Apu's evolution from the traditional village to the modern
world is deeply etched. The city supplies leadership toward liberation. In
The Goddess (Devi), the rich rural landlord with his traditional education
is wedded to outdated beliefs. It is his son, who is studying in a Calcutta
college under the radical reformist Henry Derozio, who represents reason
and tries to prevent the tragedy that overcomes his wife because of his
father's religious superstitions. Thus the city is the source of light and of
liberation from servitude. The British had to leave because of the able
leadership of the Western-educated Indian, and the whole country knew
it. The massive mutiny of the previous century had failed because it did
not know the sources of its enemy's power.
In a highly successful film of 1937, Shantaram's The World Does Not
Understand (Duniya na Maane), a young girl is married off, against her
wishes, to a decrepit old man who has a daughter her age. The young girl,
however, is very spirited and refuses to consummate the marriage. In this
resistance who should help her but her stepdaughter, who is a leading
social reformer of the area. The two become such close friends that they
sing Longfellow's Psalm of Life together, in English, and hold out against
the old man until he gives up his designs and begs his wife's forgiveness.
On his deathbed, he asks her to remarry - an inconceivable idea for the
traditional Hindu widow.
In another film of the same year, a crazy comedy called The Celibate
(Brahmachari), an educated modern woman chases the man she loves,
weans him away from his religious vows, and makes him marry her.
Neither film could be made today - at least within the ambit of the
popular cinema. The city has become evil in the decades since indepen-
dence. But in order to explain something of this transformation, it is nec-
essary to cite certain historical and social factors.
Given the size of India's population, the 25 percent that lives in the
urban areas still forms a large audience for the cinema. Except for some
touring cinemas located in the south, the cinema theaters are overwhelm-
ingly urban. The rural element of the audience comes from the urban
periphery. Villagers who come to town to buy and sell will often see a
show before going back home by bus or train, or on foot. Fairs and festi-
vals and places of pilgrimage, to which both men and women come with
their children, provide another important point of contact with the cin-
ema. In some villages, sets owned by rich peasants and landlords plus
some community sets placed there by government provide a certain
 CHIDANANDA DAS GUPTA

amount of cinematic fare through television. The radio, which is ubiqui-

tous, constantly blares forth film songs, without which the popular cin-
ema would not be what it is. Most villagers, of course, have relatives in
towns whom they visit and who in tum visit them, making a conduit for
the transmission of vicarious experience of films. Nevertheless, the cinema
remains a basically urban phenomenon. It requires the supply of electric-
ity and infrastructural facilities that limit its spread to rural areas, where
such facilities are at best inadequate, even though over 60 percent of
India's 570,000 villages do have some electricity and are connected by bus
routes.
Until independence, even this peripheral audience was minute in size.
Cinema theaters were concentrated in the cities. Inevitably, the films made
at the time primarily addressed themselves to the middle class, which had
considerably expanded during the consolidation of British administration
and the infrastructure created in its service. The main concerns of the
films were social reform, the glorification of Indian history, and the revivi-
fication of its mythology through the magical properties of film technique.
Independence set in motion a process of rapid industrialization and
urbanization, which in tum resulted in large-scale migration to the cities
and the growth of an urban working class. The uneducated began to dom-
inate the cinema audience because the expansion of the working class, as
well as of the unemployed seeking work in the cities, altered the cultural
composition and the money map of the urban areas. The working class
made rapid progress in terms of money; but the ranks of the unemployed
also swelled and made urban destitution much more fearful than rural
poverty. The emphasis on industrial expansion without corresponding
investments in educational opportunities and standards led to a rapid lum-
penization at the urban grass roots. As a result, films were now made pri-
marily for the uneducated. The enthusiasm for social reform slowly evap-
orated out of the films. The middle-class audience was largely subsumed
into the film culture of the urban lumpen, which had lost much of its rural
moorings in tradition and yet failed to acquire an urban character. The
slums of the cities - now about 30 percent of the metropolitan popula-
tion - acquired far greater influence on the standards of filmmaking
because the producers constantly sought the lowest common level of
acceptance of their products. They tried to find commonality amongst an
extremely varied population in the superficies of modernism rather than in
the depths of regional tradition. The slowly expanding rural cinema audi-
THE RURAL BASE OF AN URBAN PHENOMENON

ence was subjected more and more to the urban lumpen standards that the
cinema had begun to adopt. At the same time, the Gandhian-Nehruvian
identity with the rural masses had declined, and the cultural divide
between the rural and the urban had widened.
By the 1960s, the middle-class oriented films and their effort to hold all
audiences together in the work of Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt, and Bimal Roy
had died out. Bimal Roy himself made An Acre of Land (Do Bigha
Zamin), about a debt-ridden peasant who comes to the city to make
money as a rickshaw-puller. The film was hailed by the educated audience
and is considered by many as a precursor of Satyajit Ray's early neoreal-
ism. But like the Apu films, An Acre of Land was rarely seen by the lower
sections of the urban audience and its rural periphery.
A New Cinema now came into being with Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak,
and Mrinal Sen, and a firm divide sprang up between the cinema of the
elite and that of the common man. In a sense, the divide was also between
the urban and the rural because the new films acquired a markedly urban
outlook. It was the point of view of the urban educated that went into
these films. The so-called commercial cinema continued to design its
appeal to the sector of the urban population that had arrived from the vil-
lages not so long ago and suffered from a sense of alienation. Few among
the migrants to the city did not have strong links with the villages they had
left behind. Most of them were there as men without women, having left
their families in the village home. For them, as also the producers who
made films for them, the village came to represent tradition and goodness
and the city, the modern and the evil. The village girl was good, the city
girl bad; you had your fun with the city vamp but married the village
belle. This equation quickly expanded to take in the Indian as opposed to
the Western. In Evening in Paris, Sharmila Tagore played two sisters, one
modern and the other traditional, leaving you in no doubt about which
one was better. In Two Roads (Do Raaste), and East and West (Purab aur
Pachhim), similar judgments were made. Of course, the dichotomy often
represented an inner conflict between two selves resting within the same
soul, as Otto Rank says in The Double. It was also an indicator of the
social dilemmas of choice. But in no time, the bikini-clad woman, the
vamp, the nightclub singer, the photographer's model became the embodi-
ment of the evil city; the mother emerged as the icon of the family, the
symbol, although not an active agent, of an unchanged tradition en-
shrined in the archetypal village.
 CHIDANANDA DAS GUPTA

Once upon a time, the family was an agricultural concept of kinship

bound by the common ownership of land and the labor upon it, untram-
meled by geographical mobility or by the seductions of new professions
and occupations springing up. That image of the village now ceased to be
real in the life of the migrant and turned into a dream. The village lived
more and more in the country of the mind and continued to supply an
increasingly unrealistic model. Families in the city splintered, becoming
increasingly nuclear; land holdings in the village grew smaller and smaller
under the pressures of nuclearization of the family. The extended family
became impossible to sustain in the competitive, combative atmosphere of
the city. These dangers to the family became embodied in the villain who
harmed it and therefore had to be revenged upon. The Mother and the
Family and the protection of their honor became the formula of the I97os.
The presiding deity of this world view was Amitabh Bachchan, India's big-
gest box-office phenomenon ever, who acted in a series of amazing block-
busters. Until recently, he was an elected member of Parliament but has
continued to act in films, with uncertain results. The guardian of rural
values has defected to the city and is no longer welcome. The charges of
corruption laid at his door have placed him in the very center of the city's
evil heart. The urban villager can no longer identify with him.
To go back to the I97os, the frequent disappearance of the father in the
films of this period resulted in the dominance of the mother. This could
well reflect the situation of the rural family whose migrant father leaves
the children in the care of the mother exposed to multiple dangers.
Toward the end of these films, father, mother, and sons would of course be
reunited, perhaps in the fulfillment of a dream. Amar, Akbar Anthony, a
hugely successful film, is a notable case in point. In this blockbuster, the
father is removed early from the scene, the children lose touch with
mother, and the orphans are brought up by surrogate fathers of different
religions. They hover physically close to each other and to mother without
knowing. At the end of the film, all identities are rediscovered. Father too
is unearthed from somewhere and brought back into the fold. The three
religions merge into one. They are all Hindus, the dominant religious
community. The modern pressures that had splintered the family are mi-
raculously overcome by mother's binding power and all are reunited.
The city divides, the village unites. The village is the fountainhead of
security and identity in the psyche of the uprooted. The migrant cannot
strike new roots in the urban psychological ground composed of totally
THE RURAL BASE OF AN URBAN PHENOMENON 93

different patterns of interdependence determined by institutions rather

than individuals. The preindustrial dream haunts the soul imprisoned in
the unfamiliar, impersonal situation created by the divisive nature of pro-
duction itself and by the alienating anonymity imposed by the bewildering
variety and the sheer massiveness of urban human conglomerations. The
migrant is a lonely man, forever regarding himself as a temporary resi-
dent, harboring a dream of return which he consciously knows to be
impossible. He is caught in an inexorable, irreversible change that he can-
not fully accept. The major part of the urban cinema audience is thus rural
at heart.
In a country that has lived for thousands of years as a honeycomb of
self-contained group identities at its grass roots, the sudden breakdown of
dividing walls in an industrial world with its rapid communications and
its changing configurations, its high social and geographical mobility,
poses a serious threat. A secret fear of homogenization haunts the mind.
Will my son eat beef when he goes to the city? Will he marry some girl of
his own choice who will be unacceptable to the mother? Thus the rural
population, the urban working class, the unemployed migrant, the petty
trader, the slum-dweller remain a community set apart from those who
have accepted the values of the city and continue to see it as a center of
growth, the point of take-off into a great future. In Anand Patwardhan's
film on Bombay, Sohrab Godrej, the industrialist, standing on the roof
garden of his penthouse flat, says: "Why don't those people [the slum-
dwellers] go back to where they came from? After all, they came from
somewhere:' The urban sophisticate rejects rural man as unfit to live in
the city.
Once we see this, it becomes clear why the advanced middle class needs
its own separate cinema. It continues to see itself as the determinant of the
country's destiny - despite the divide that has descended between the elite
and the masses with the loss of the power of persuasive communication of
the Gandhi-Nehru era, compounded by the frustration over the inequity
of distribution of the fruits of development. In spite of its own criticism of
the evils of the city, the post-Ray generation sees itself as the cutting edge
of social reform, redress of economic and political wrongs, as well as aes-
thetic development - the very areas vacated by the popular cinema. Thus
there is no pastoralism in the New Cinema but a strong social critique of
rural conditions, both economic and cultural. The New Cinema has a
sense of certain new goals denied to the common man. It stands for a con-
94 CHIDANANDA DAS GUPTA

tinuing, evolving synthesis of tradition and modernity, East and West, pre-
industrial and industrial values calculated to ensure the unity and the
material and spiritual development of the country. In this it has the unify-
ing instrument of a national language of the elite - which is English.
Without it, the North could not converse with the South, men and women
of different linguistic areas could not marry or form friendships or even
travel. Hindi is the official lingua franca of the country but is far from
being accepted as such by society. Gautam Ghosh from Calcutta and
Ketan Mehta from Gujerat can discuss social problems or world cinema,
but the common man from those two areas would have to use sign lan-
guage to communicate. Thus the elite and the masses form two separate
worlds. These new filmmakers form an inexorable part of the English-
speaking elite even though they make films about the masses in Indian lan-
guages and not in English.
Naturally the films of the New Cinema are not seen by the people about
whom they are made. This is especially true in the field of the all-India
Hindi film. Regional cinemas have a somewhat better time but are not free
from the problem. In Bengal, for instance, Satyajit Ray's films are widely
seen, often achieving commercial success. But that too is due to the pres-
ence of a large, expanding, politically aware middle class. The situation is
still better in Kerala in the southwest, where literacy is high and the urban-
rural divide is weaker, almost all of coastal Kerala being one semiurban
continuum. Taken all in all, however, the audience divide in the country is
so real that the explorations of the New Cinema are at best exercises in
self-discovery and search for identity with the people on the part of an
alienated elite. At worst, they constitute a pursuit of new aesthetic sensa-
tions within certain modish formulae of social awareness. Thus a film like
Gautam Ghosh's Paar projects a moving portrayal of a migrant peasant
couple in the city with the certain knowledge that the film would not be
seen by the people whose fate it depicts. Arousing the middle-class con-
science seems to be the sole social satisfaction such films can hope to
derive - at least within the present privately owned, profit-seeking setup
of distribution and exhibition, even for films financed mostly by the state
and sometimes by individuals for the social good and for the sake of artis-
tic achievement.
Ironically, the New Cinema, beginning with Satyajit Ray, has a slow
rhythm derived from the traditional pace of the country's life. Apu's jour-
ney through life is unhurried, attuned to a preindustrial society that
THE RURAL BASE OF AN URBAN PHENOMENON 95

ignores models set by the islands of modernity in which the films them-
selves are made. Nirad Mahapatra's Maya Miriga, an exquisite study of
the breakup of a joint family, is Ozu-like in its stillness and belongs to the
rhythm of life of its region. Even Ray's Big City, that is, Calcutta, is set to
the rhythm that would be natural to a genteel middle-class woman orient-
ing herself to a working life. The rhythm is a part of the realism of the
films and their effort to get to the essence of a way of life.
It is in the commercial cinema designed for the semiurban and the rural
that we come across a frenzied pace. If Kehtan Mehta's Spices (Mirch
Masala) were to be remade by the movie moghuls, it would be speeded up
a hundred percent. In the average blockbuster, the major part of the two-
and-a-half hours is taken up by the songs and the dances; experiments in
exporting them without these numbers have resulted in unsaleably short
features. Being spectacles, these films move incredibly fast in order to pre-
vent their audiences from having any chance to think. The songs and
dances, especially the dances, are cut with amazing speed and finesse,
using a very large number of minute cuts where the New Cinema would
use much longer, contemplative takes. This rapid-fire style of cutting in
the commercial film derives clearly from the West, in direct contradiction
to the pace of the life of both its subject and its audience. Sometimes the
rhythm is aptly used, as in the opening sequence of Shaan, in which
Mazhar Khan, playing a maimed beggar in the employ of a gang of ban-
dits, rolls his wooden platform along the streets of Bombay with skyscrap-
ers zooming above him in low-angle shots as he speeds his way to inform
the gang chief of his latest findings. The opening sequence of Sholay,
India's best-made and most famous curry western, is a smartly executed
race across the top of a speeding train that could have come from a
western.
In other words, the commercial cinema uses a city-slick pace regardless
of the pace of life of the people it portrays or the place in which its story
occurs. The New Cinema adopts the rhythm of its subject. In Satyajit
Ray's The Middleman (1975), the pace is much faster than in Big City
(1963). The camera moves restlessly as it follows the brisk pace at which
the novice is walking with the seasoned businessman along the streets of
Calcutta to learn the tricks of the trade. The pacing also has to do with the
attitude to the city. The Calcutta of the Big City was benign; in The Mid-
dleman, the city has become evil. The industrial city brutalizes the youth
in transition from a preindustrial state of mind. In Saeed Mirza's Why
 CHIDANANDA DAS GUPTA

Does Albert Pinto Get Angry? a sizzling quarrel takes place between boy
and girlfriend on a motor bike slicing through peak traffic in Bombay,
fully reflecting the pace of the city and the state of mind of the characters.
Thus the attitude to the city affects the formal elements of filmmaking as
much as its content. Broadly speaking, this is true of the sick jazziness of
the commercial cinema as well. It now regards our times as Kaliyuga, the
evil aeon, the last in the Hindu concept of the cycle of creation, composed
of 4,320,000 years, divided into four parts, the last of which is now draw-
ing to a close. In other words, the end of the world is approaching, and in
this evil age, the city is the center of destruction.

Chidananda Das Gupta is a leading Indian writer on cinema who has published,
among other works, a book on the cinema of Satyajit Ray. He writes a syndicated
column on the cinema, and his articles have been published in Sight and Sound,
Film Quarterly, American Film, Film Comment, and other journals.
 Seoul in Korean Cinema:
A Brief Survey

BAE CHANG-Ho

LONG AGO Adam Smith and Voltaire foresaw with hope that cities
could not only make urban life blossom with music and art, but could
enrich rural life as well. Cities, they believed, could encourage virtue and
beauty.
But the typhoon of the industrial revolution swept this romantic image
of the city away. Mass production and specialization turned human beings
into cogs of a great machine. Poets began to see the city as vice and to sing
nostalgically of country life.
Nowadays, cities remind us of a host of problems: poverty, slums,
crime, violence, prostitution, isolation, heavy traffic, pollution. But curi-
ously, even though the city has become a den of vice, people still flock to
it, leaving their friendly neighbors, their mountains and streams. Has the
city the face of an angel or a devil?
Seoul, Korea's capital and biggest city, has been a subject of Korean cin-
ema since its beginnings. Seoul was the city where the first Korean film
was produced and shown in 1909. The film was a thousand-foot-Iong fea-
ture inserted in a stage play, which showed scenes of Western civilization
in Seoul: the railroad, a street car, an automobile, and so on.
During the silent film era, about eighty films were produced, and many
used Seoul as a simple background. With the beginning of talkies in 1935,
more types of films were made, but the city was still not a subject that
attracted filmmakers, who were more interested in patriotic inspiration
against the Japanese occupation or in mere entertainment.
Tuition (1940) by Choi In-Kyu (Ch'oe In-kyu) may be the first Korean
film that treated city life in earnest. A poor family has difficulties paying
the son's tuition; the sick mother goes downtown to sell some small arti-
cles, and the boy worries about the problems he causes his parents. The

97
 BAE CHANG-HO

hard life of urban Koreans at that time was portrayed with keen realism
and pathos. With the success of Tuition, Choi turned to a broader subject,
from the individual family to society as a whole. Homeless Angel (1941)
used the difficult life of orphans in Seoul as an image of Korean society:
Seoul is the orphanage in which the fatherless Korean people are impris-
oned during the long Japanese occupation.
As Korea regained its independence in 1945, Seoul came alive with joy
and hope. But modernization and industrialization were interrupted by
the civil war of 1950. After three years of fighting, people began the recon-
struction of a city that was nothing but a ruin. By the late 1950S, Seoul
began to look like a modern city. Today it is a major modern metropolis.
Through this period, Seoul became increasingly an important subject for
Korean films.
Madame Liberty (1956), directed by Han Hyung-Mo (Han Hyong-mo),
was one of the first films to treat the conflict between traditional Korean
culture and the process of Westernization. A common housewife hears of
the city's fun and excitement and is tempted to go downtown. In her tradi-
tional Korean dress, the hanbok, she happens to enter a cabaret where a
jazz band is in full swing. In the course of the film, she turns into the
Madame Liberty of the title, who seeks her satisfaction in the pleasure
haunts of Seoul. The film struck a strong responsive chord in Korean
housewives, who made it a great commercial success. The social questions
raised by the film were hotly debated throughout Korea.
In Kim So-Dong's Money (1958), Seoul began to play the role of the vil-
lain. A farmer sells his cattle to pay for his daughter'S wedding. He is soon
cheated out of the money by swindlers in Seoul, and his whole family col-
lapses. Since the late 1950S, there has been a saying: "If you close your eyes
in Seoul, you'll lose your nose."
In 1961, two important films appeared that used Seoul as a vital influ-
ence on character. In A Horse-Cart Driver, directed by Kang Dae-Jin
(Kang Tae-jin), a poor family depends on the very occasional work the
father can find for his horse-cart in modern Seoul. Now jostled by cars
and trucks, he misses the Seoul of the old days, crossed by streams and
shaded by trees. The protagonist represents the old generation adapting
itself with difficulty to the changing life-style of the city.
The sentimental realism of A Horse-Cart Driver is replaced by dry psy-
chology in Aimless Bullet, directed by Yoo Hyun-Mok (Yu Hyon-mok).
The petit bourgeois protagonist, depressed and enervated, frequently
SEOUL IN KOREAN CINEMA 99
mutters to himself, "I want to go. 1 want to go:' The film never says
where. He only wishes to escape the city with its deep wound of civil war
and its social and political confusion. He is like an unaimed, stray bullet -
a misfire - who has lost his identity in the modern city. The public show-
ing of the film was banned by the government on the grounds that its
theme was too antisocial.
The government economic policies since the 1960s have resulted in the
heavy concentration of industry in Seoul. This has led to a large-scale
migration of rural dwellers to the city in search of jobs and a better life,
the same process that transformed London during the nineteenth century.
But they found they had exchanged their traditional homes in their towns
and villages for illegal squatters' shacks and labor at the lowest end of the
economic spectrum.
Many films of the 1960s explored the lives of these laborers of the low-
est class: Mr. Park, Blood Line, A Burden Bearer, Ephemeral Life, among
others. A particularly interesting film of this period is Kim Su-Yong's
Dried Fish (Kulbi), which resembles Ozu's Tokyo Story. An old country
couple comes to Seoul to visit their married sons and daughters, bringing
with them some dried fish as gifts. But the children are much too busy
with their city living to spend much time with them and shuffle them off to
the next sibling as quickly as possible. The traditional extended family of
Korea is disintegrating under the pressures of city life.
Lee Man-Hee (Yi Man-hili), one of the most capable filmmakers of the
1960s, was deeply interested in the theme of the city, as seen in his two
films of 1965, Black Wheat and Market. The former explores the dark side
of Seoul, swarming with hookers, bums, and hoodlums. The hero, a slum
hoodlum nicknamed Eagle, falls in love with a pure girl, who gives him
some hope for a brighter life. Eagle tries but fails to escape the evil of the
city; the vice of Seoul is too deeply rooted in the hero to be uprooted by
the heroine's virtue.
Market shows how the original Seoul-born market people have been
displaced, first by refugees from the North and then by country people
drawn to the economic opportunities of the city. They meet in the market-
place to compete fiercely and if possible survive, a microcosm of the life of
Seoul itself.
One of the biggest social problems of the 1970S was the increasing rural
exodus, especially of the young, which created a crisis in farm labor, a
major industry in Korea. Unlike the previous generation, these young peo-
100 BAE CHANG-HO

pIe were seeking a better cultural rather than just economic life. They
wanted to enjoy city life, watch TV, go to the theater, dance in disco-
theques, and drink beer in bars. Many of these new migrants were young
women and even girls. They had to replace their vague dreams with low-
level labor in factories, housework in private homes, waitressing in clubs,
or being prostitutes in slums. Many of the films of the 1970S dealt with
these young women, notably Home of the Stars (1974) by Lee Jang-Ho (Yi
Chang-ho), The Heyday of YOng-ja (1975) by Kim Ho-Sun (Kim Ho-son),
and Kim Su-Yong's Girls Who Went to the City (1979).
The very popular Home of the Stars shows how a pure girl ruins her life
in the cold-hearted city. She meets four men - a clergyman, a business-
man, a painter, and a bum - who use her ill and discard her. In the end,
the abandoned heroine commits suicide on the snow-covered banks of the
Han River, a traditional symbol of Seoul. True love is lost in the egoism of
city life.
Despite its happy ending, The Heyday of YOng-ja is an even deeper and
more direct look at the life of the poor in Seoul. YOng-ja (a typical name of
a country girl) comes to Seoul with no definite purpose in mind. She
works first as a housemaid and then as a bus conductor, only to lose her
arm in a traffic accident. Soon she is a tough hooker in a downtown slum
area. But YOng-ja's humanity, which has been stolen from her by the city,
is restored to her by the pure love of a young man who works in a lowly
capacity in the city baths, scrubbing the city grime off the patrons' backs.
Kim Su-Yong's Girls Who Went to the City shows how the human rights
of poor workers are disregarded by a system based on materialism. The
heroines, three young women bus conductors, are searched after each
working day to see whether they have stolen a few coins. Finally, one of
them goes up to the rooftop of a high building and shouts out over the
city, "We are people!"
Curiously, the union of female bus conductors demonstrated success-
fully against the public showing of the film, claiming it showed only the
negative side of conductors' jobs. Except for this film, however, most of
the socially conscious films of this period were commercially successful
because they appealed to the many young women who had experienced
similar problems when they came to Seoul from the country.
Wangsimni (1979), directed by 1m Kwon Taek (1m Kwon-t'aek), devel-
oped a new theme. Now wholly absorbed into Seoul, Wangsimni was only
a short time ago a charming, even pastoral suburb, with a ferry, streams,
SEOUL IN KOREAN CINEMA 101

and famous vegetable gardens. The protagonist returns to his former

home in Wangsimni only to find it strangely changed. The ferry where he
once played with his friends has been replaced by a huge concrete bridge.
On the wide gardens where his father worked stand ten-story buildings.
He searches but cannot find a single familiar or friendly face. The once
peaceful and neighborly life of Seoul has been lost forever.
In the 1980s, Seoul achieved the status of an international capital. With
its population of nearly ten million people living in one of the highest pop-
ulation densities in the world, Seoul suffers from severe social problems:
unemployment, squatters, crime, alienation, and the growing gulf be-
tween rich and poor.
Lee Jang-Ho's A Good Windy Day (1980) (the first film on which I col-
laborated as scriptwriter and assistant director) portrayed the transforma-
tion of suburbs into urban centers in their own right, "new towns." Lee's
Home of the Stars had shown the problems of young women in the city.
His new film showed three young men moving to Seoul in different ways
and for different reasons and taking a succession of typical jobs, ending up
as a delivery boy for a Chinese restaurant, a hairwasher in a barber shop,
and a motel bellhop. The three meet by chance in one of the new towns in
a suburb of Seoul. They share with each other their friendship, news of
their love affairs, their grief, frustrations, and hopes. They try to adjust to
their bad circumstances - their poverty, lack of opportunity, and discrimi-
natory treatment - but what they find hardest to endure is the general
social indifference of the world around them. In the epilogue, the delivery
boy, who aspires to be a boxer, says to the audience, "I was beaten by
Seoul. But Seoul is just a place where people live. I think I can make it
here." For the three young men, Seoul is always a windy city, but they
make an effort to help each other and to be of good cheer.
In 1981, Lee Jang-Ho turned to the growing prostitution problem in
Seoul with Children of Darkness, set in the red-light district (I worked on
this film in the same capacities). Kasu (which means "singer"), a beautiful
and famous prostitute, has a sad past. She ran away from home with the
dream of becoming a famous singer. She applies to a music school in
Seoul, and for a kickback the dishonest teacher fools her into joining a
low-class traveling troupe. After several years touring the countryside, she
returns to Seoul with,the sad memory of the death of her illegitimate son.
Having been sold by others, she decides to sell herself and becomes a
member of the red-light district. She tries to overcome these sad experi-
102 BAE CHANG-HO

ences by gradually coming to her own way of life, which includes offering
love to someone whom all others find unlovable.
A special characteristic of this film is its exploration of the role of media
in Kasu's tragedy. The heroine remembers how as a child she would watch
every night the luxurious life of singing stars on television and dream of
becoming a singer herself, a dream that led her to ruin. Television has
spread throughout the Korean countryside, bringing to the rural poor its
traditionally tempting images of the city life of the rich.
I want now to describe my own works on life in Seoul. I was the
youngest director of the early 1980s when I made my first film, People in a
Slum (1982), based on real-life stories. In a squatter village on the outskirts
of Seoul, where people survive by working at whatever they can find, the
heroine nicknamed Black Glove lives with her lover and her son from an
earlier marriage. Throughout the story, the many problems the squatters
face are described: unemployment, crime, housing, lack of educational
opportunities, and so on. But the richness of the human heart - seen in
the warm relations between the troubled heroine and her neighbors and in
all their efforts to preserve friendship and hope - is a genuine triumph
over their sad conditions.
Since industrialization, Seoul has been treated as a center of vice, but
people continue to move there in the hope of a better material life. In my
own view, however, the real joy of our lives comes from our good relations
with people, not from material goods. Since I believe that film as an art
form should deal with people's souls, 1 decided to make a film about how
the human soul can be sickened by city life.
Tropical Flower (1983) depicts alienation and lack of communication in
the modern city. "I;' the unnamed protagonist, lives isolated in an expen-
sive apartment and feels like a drifter on an uninhabited island. One day
in early summer "I" sees out his window a woman moving into an apart-
ment in the building facing his. She is the type of beauty "I" has long been
craving. Under the name of Mr. M, "I" tries to approach her and win her
soul, but is outraged when he discovers that she is the pathetic mistress of
a pleasure-seeking middle-aged businessman. "I" immediately decides to
save her. He also learns by talking with her on the phone as Mr. M that
she is constantly searching for true love, but is always falling victim to
men's desires. "I" decides to wreak vengeance in her behalf on the men
who have abused her. On a rainy day, Mr. M meets the heroine for the
first time. At first friendly, he begins to berate her for her past life, gradu-
SEOUL IN KOREAN CINEMA 10 3

ally becoming so frenzied that she realizes he is insane. Trying to break out
of his isolation, "I" has destroyed the relation he wanted to establish.
Wanting to communicate with the woman he loves, he has conveyed to her
the magnitude of his mental and emotional problem. In the first scene of
the movie, the enormous concrete apartment complex symbolizes the iso-
lated living of individuals in Seoul. A voice is heard over the image, say-
ing, "I don't like this city. This city is full of evil desires. I am a stranger
trying to find a true love in this city:' The film ends by showing the same
complex with the voice of the protagonist, saying, "I am a prisoner who is
guilty of not loving people. I will be imprisoned in this apartment forever:'
In my two films, I showed two kinds of people. People in a Slum shows
the healthy soul in conditions of poverty; Tropical Flower, in the sick
world of luxury. What is more important in our own lives?
My Deep Blue Night (1985) is not set in Seoul, but it does show an
aspect of Korean urban living today. More than three hundred thousand
Koreans live in the major American city, Los Angeles. Many of them
immigrated for a better economic and cultural life, greater educational
opportunities for their children, and a more stable political and social
atmosphere than Seoul.
Under American immigration law, a foreigner who marries a u.s. citi-
zen is eligible for a "green card;' a residence and work permit. Deep Blue
Night is the story of Hobin Beck, an illegal Korean immigrant, who has
come to America to realize his dreams of wealth, and Jane, the former
wife of a GI stationed in Korea, who is now a legal resident, but leading a
lonely and frustrated life in her new country. Jane works in a bar, but her
main source of income comes from allowing herself to become a wife in
contract marriages that enable illegals to obtain the green card. These
short, mock marriages have earned her enough to live a luxurious life in a
fashionable home in the Hollywood hills. In fact, she is sick and tired of
her life and unconsciously misses a genuine relationship. When a "match-
maker" puts Mr. Beck in contact with her, she begins to feel a certain hope
that she might be able to settle down. But Beck, who has adopted the
catchy name Gregory Peck, already has a y6bo (sweetheart) in Korea, and
she is pregnant. So after obtaining his green card, Beck asks Jane for his
divorce. She will not consent. Beck's y6bo keeps sending him cassette
tapes pleading with him to send for her. Jane begs him to start their own
relationship again, this time with love rather than a contract. The tension
between these two appeals drives Beck to the film's tragic ending.
I04 BAE CHANG-HO

In the film, Los Angeles provides examples of problems different from

those of Seoul - like illegal immigrants, armed robbery, and a harassing
legal system - but the real problems still lie deeper: in the minds of the
characters, who use good things, like marriage, for selfish ends.
At one point, Beck says, "Los Angeles - that means the place of the
angels." Jane answers, "Shit! It's a desert:' For lonely and isolated Jane,
Los Angeles is a wasteland where emotional comfort and fulfillment are
hard to find.
After making eight films, I wanted to make a small, beautiful love story
in a city setting. Our Sweet Days of Youth (I987) is based partly on my col-
lege experience of desperate and unrequited love. I intended to shoot most
of the film in New York as the representative modern city. But when, after
finishing about thirty percent of the shooting, I went to New York to scout
locations, I couldn't find any that added something special to this particu-
lar film that couldn't be found in Seoul. Seoul has become so modern
itself! So in the final script, Central Park was replaced by lOksu Palace
Park, a pizzeria by a Korean pastry shop, and Greenwich Village by the
busy streets of Myong-dong.
In a mere thirty years, Seoul has experienced the development that the
West had two hundred years to absorb. Korean films have dealt with
many of the problems that have been faced. If Seoul becomes, as expected,
another Tokyo or New York, it will face new problems that are even more
serious and difficult than the old ones. Cinema has shown itself perhaps
overeager to portray this evil face of city life.
In my opinion, filmmakers should also portray the good. A city is a
place where people gather to live together. In any such living, there cannot
be only negative aspects, there must be some happiness and pleasure. If
filmmakers can explore positive aspects of our modern life, city dwellers
can learn from them some ways of achieving a more humane life-style, one
based on mutual help and warm support, in whatever circumstances they
find themselves.

Bae Chang-Ho (Pae Ch'ang-ho) is a prize-winning Korean film director and in

1987 was filmmaker-in-residence at the Institute of Culture and Communication
and the East-West Center.
 A Tale of Two Cities:
Cultural Polyphony and
Ethnic Transformation

ROBERT STAM

FIRST THE very long shot. Two countries: Brazil and the United States.
Two vast New World lands similar in both historical formation and ethnic
composition. Both began as European colonies, one of Portugal, the other
of Great Britain. In both countries, colonization was followed by the con-
quest of vast territories that involved the near-genocidal subjugation of the
indigenous peoples. In the United States, the conquerors were called pio-
neers; in Brazil, they were called bandeirantes. Both countries massively
imported blacks from Africa to form the two largest slave societies of
modern times, up until slavery was abolished, with the Emancipation
Proclamation of I863 in the United States and the "Golden Law" of I888 in
Brazil. Both countries received successive waves of immigration, indeed
often the same waves of immigration, from all over the world, ultimately
forming pI uri-ethnic societies with substantial Indian, black, Italian, Ger-
man, Japanese, Slavic, Arab, and Jewish communities.
Now a somewhat closer view, of two cities of roughly equivalent popu-
lation: New York and Sao Paulo. From the air, a similar spread of tall
buildings and urban development, but the Brazilian city is not traversed
by so many mighty rivers or blessed with so many beautiful parks.
Although it might seem a sacrilege to compare what many regard as the
preeminent metropolis of the world to a Third World city that few First
Worlders have even the slightest notion about, the fact remains that signif-
icant parallels link the two cities. In both cities, indigenous populations
preceded the European arrival, and in both cases the indigenous presence
left traces in place-names: Manhattan, Ipiranga, Montauk, Pacaembu.
Sao Paulo was founded on the site of an Indian village in I554; its founder,
Padre Jose de Anchieta, was versed in the local Indian idioms and even

I05
106 ROBERT STAM

wrote a grammar and a dictionary for the Tupf language. New York was
purchased from its Indian inhabitants for $24 worth of trinkets in 1626,
some seventy-four years later. Although it is not well known, the historical
destinies of New York and Brazil were linked from the beginning. Histo-
rian Warren Dean (1987) points out that in the seventeenth century, Dutch
settlers brought Afro-Brazilian slaves with them from Brazil to what was
then called New Amsterdam, and even granted them a measure of free-
dom in order to make them allies in the fight against the British. The first
Jews to arrive in New York were Sephardim who came from Recife, Bra-
zil, in 1636 and founded the synagogue that still stands on West 70th Street
in Manhattan. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, New York and
Sao Paulo received some of the same waves of immigrants from the same
countries: Germans, Italians, Jews from Poland and Russia, Arabs from
Lebanon and Syria, Chinese, Japanese, and so forth. Both received as well
"internal immigrants" such as blacks from the South, in the case of New
York, and blacks from Bahia and Minas, in the case of Sao Paulo. Both
cities have their Italian neighborhoods - Little Italy in New York, Bras
and Bexiga in Sao Paulo, their turn-of-the-century Jewish communities -
the lower east side in New York, Born Retiro in Sao Paulo, and their
Asiatic communities - Chinatown in New York and the Japanese district
called "Liberdade" in Sao Paulo. Indeed, many Brazilians have North
American relatives who trace their origins back to the same villages in
Poland or Italy or Lebanon or Japan.
I do not intend to develop an elaborate comparison between New York
and Sao Paulo (and obviously the differences are as important as the simi-
larities). I simply wish to stress one aspect of both cities: their "poly-
phonic" ethnic and cultural nature as reflected in films generally and in
two specific films: Woody Allen's Zelig and Joaquim Pedro de Andrade's
Macunaima. At the historical origins of the cultural diversity of both
countries we find the same triad of white European, native indigenous
peoples, and blacks brought from Africa, although the degree of mixing
among the three groups was obviously much more intense and widespread
in Brazil. The basic triad was subsequently augmented, in both countries,
by a wide diversity of immigrant strains, all part of an ongoing history in
which diverse new arrivals impact complexly on a preexisting population,
flowing into a broader nonfinalized polyphony of cultures.
We see the end result of this ongoing process in present-day New York,
a city where public schools teach in at least eight languages, where the
A TALE OF TWO CITIES 10 7

mass is celebrated in more than a score, and where prospective drivers can
take the driving exam in Russian or Spanish. Present-day New York is a
black, Latin, Asian, and European cosmopolis, one that has Koreans run-
ning its twenty-four-hour markets, Indians running the newsstands, Arabs
running neighborhood groceries, and Senegalese and Nigerians working
as street vendors, not to mention two hundred thousand Russian Jews,
Israelis, Poles, Italians, Greeks, Cubans, Haitians, Jamaicans, and other
Caribbeans.
Ever since its earliest days as a Dutch-managed polyglot trading port,
New York has served as a kind of conduit for ethnic forces and popula-
tions. Jim Sleeper (1987) compares it to a "great human heart which draws
into itself immigrant bloodstreams, and after working its strange alchemy,
pumps them back out again across America:' New York has become a
"minority-majority" city, a city without any clear or overwhelming ethnic
majority, where each apparently unified community itself breaks down
into numerous subcultures traversed by class, generation, and the nuances
of ethnicity. The very language of New York streets is syncretic, hybrid,
consisting of Yiddishized English, anglicized Spanish, and so forth. When
Rupert Pupkin (Robert de Niro), in Scorcese's The King of Comedy, calls
Masha (Sandra Bernhard) "el schmucko supremo;' he is offering nothing
more than a typical example of the hybridized language of the city.
In the cases of both New York and Sao Paulo, the cinema has "translat-
ed;' reflected, refracted, or sublimated this ethnic diversity into filmic
images. Much of the potential force and audacity of both Brazilian and
North American cinema derives from the capacity to stage the cultural
conflicts and complementarities intrinsic to a heteroglot culture, and cities
such as New York and Sao Paulo obviously form privileged sites for this
kind of ethnic interplay. Many Sao Paulo films focus on specific ethnic
communities. Lauro Escorel's short film as Libertarios (The Libertarians,
1973) treats the largely Italian anarchist movement of the 1920S, a South
American version of the same political movement that animated such fig-
ures as Sacco and Vanzetti in the United States in the same period. Sergio
Person's Sao Paulo, Sociedade Anomina (Sao Paulo, Inc., 1966) deals with
the Italian community in Sao Paulo at a later point in its historical trajec-
tory, at a time when many were working in the burgeoning automobile
industry of the city. Compasso de Espera (Marking Time, 1973) focuses on
the travails of Jorge, a black Sao Paulo poet and advertising agent, as a
pretext for an inventory of the racist features of Brazilian society. (Many
108 ROBERT STAM

of the film's political discussions, for example, those between integra-

tionists and separatists, could have as easily been set in New York as in
Sao Paulo.) Tizuka Yamasaki's Gaijin highlights the Japanese immigration
at the turn of the century. In many other films, such as Babenco's Pixote
(1982), Sergio Toledo's Vera (1986), and Wilson de Barros's Anjos da Noite
(Angels of the Night, 1987), connections of friendship or sexuality are
made easily across lines of race and ethnicity.
Countless films set in New York, similarly, from Levi and Cohen: The
Irish Comedians (1903) through West Side Story to Cotton Club have cen-
trally featured interaction between the diverse ethnic communities. Many
New York-based films pivot on some sort of ethnic interplay as a key
structuring strategy: black/white in Brother from Another Planet, Anglo/
Latino in Crossover Dreams, Jewish/black/Puerto Rican in The Pawn-
broker, and bohemian-polyphonic in Next Stop Greenwich Village and
Hair. In films such as Alan Parker's Fame and Mazursky's Moscow on the
Hudson, a New York setting helps generate a rich weave of ethnic voices.
In Fame, youthful representatives of diverse communities - black, Puerto
Rican, Jewish - collaborate within a kind of utopia of artistic expression.
In Moscow on the Hudson, the Robin Williams character enters into
dialogic interaction with a diverse gallery of synecdochic ethnic figures -
black, Italian, Puerto Rican, Jewish - and each dialogue becomes influ-
enced by the specific accents and intonations of a culturally defined
interlocutor.
It is only recently, I should point out, that both Brazilian and North
American cinema have even approached cultural polyphony. Brazilian cin-
ema went from a virtually lily-white cinema, in the silent period, to one
that progressively embraced more and more of Brazil's ethnic communi-
ties in the seventies and eighties. The history of racism as reflected in
American cinema, meanwhile, has already been delineated by Donald
Bogle, with respect to blacks, by Ralph and Natasha Friar, with respect to
native Americans, and by Alan Woll and Arthur Petit in relation to hispan-
ics, so there is no need for me to review their conclusions here. As late as
the fifties, in both countries, we find at best timidity and at worst racism
concerning questions of ethnicity. In Brazil in the fifties, the Hollywood-
style Vera Cruz production company made films set in Sao Paulo that con-
sistently elided the black presence, except as maids, in that city, in films
where the physiognomies of the actors, the decor, the costumes, and even
the music were calculated to evoke a European or North American ambi-
A TALE OF TWO CITIES 10 9

ence. The films set in New York in this period, meanwhile, tended to
downplay the ethnic diversity of the city. The Jewish presence was often
euphemistic at best, featuring what Lester Friedman calls "safe Jews" who
looked, spoke, and acted far more like their gentile neighbors than their
immigrant parents or grandparents, while the black presence was often
elided completely to become a kind of "structuring absence:' Despite the
emergence of black stars such as Sidney Poitier, as late as 1957 a film such
as Alfred Hitchcock's supposedly documentary-like The Wrong Man
could show the streets and subways and the prisons of New York City as
totally devoid of blacks.
The sixties, seventies, and eighties, as is well known, brought a kind of
resurgence of ethnicity in the cinema. I would now like to focus on two
films, one from the late sixties and the other from the early eighties, one
deeply rooted in Sao Paulo and the other in New York, as examples of this
resurgence. Both treat the theme of the city as privileged locus of ethnic
and cultural interaction, at times in strikingly similar ways. The first film
is Joaquim Pedro de Andrade's Macunaima (1969), based on the famous
1928 Brazilian modernist novel of the same title by Sao Paulo writer Mario
de Andrade. The story of both film and novel concerns the improbable
adventures of a Brazilian antihero who goes from the Amazon region to
Sao Paulo and undergoes diverse transformations on the way. The second
is Zelig (1983), the Woody Allen film about a bizarre chameleon man who
has an uncanny talent for taking on the accent and ethnicity of his
interlocutors. Zelig is obviously deeply rooted in the cultural life of New
York City, for the film constantly foregrounds the city's standard iconog-
raphy and urban landmarks - Fifth Avenue, Times Square, Washington
Square, Union Square; its ethnic neighborhoods - the lower east side,
Chinatown; its institutions - Manhattan Hospital, The New York Daily
Mirror; and its intellectuals - Susan Sontag, Irving Howe, Morton Blum.
The most striking feature of the two films, for our purposes, is that they
both revolve around multiethnic protagonists who "condense;' as it were,
the ambient ethnic polyphony. Both characters, furthermore, undergo
racial metamorphoses. Zelig is born white and Jewish but subsequently
becomes Indian, black, Irish, Italian, Mexican, and Chinese. Macunaima
is born Indian and black but subsequently transforms himself into a white
Portuguese prince and even into a French divorcee. (These metamor-
phoses are diversely handled in cinematic terms, of course: Macunaima
basically relies on the use of two actors and "magical" editing substitu-
IIO ROBERT STAM

tions, while Zelig deploys a rich panoply of cinematic and extracinematic

devices such as makeup, manipulated photographs, ironic "anchorage;'
and trick cinematography.) The theme, in any case, is the same. Both
Macunaima and Zelig are oxymoronic protagonists, larger-than-life com-
posite characters who epitomize ethnic interaction and hybridization.
Macunaima, the "hero without any character;' as the novel's subtitle has
it, lacks character not only in the conventional moral sense but also in that
he is ethnically plural and identityless. Zelig too might be called a "hero
without any character;' again both in the characterological and in the eth-
nic sense. Both protagonists personify the cultural "heteroglossia" or
"many-Ianguagedness" of the cities from which they emerge. They resem-
ble their cities, which are like them the sites of constant metamorphosis,
disintegration, assimilation, and renewal.
In the case of the novel Macunaima, polyethnicity lies at the very kernel
of its theme and even in its process of creation. As a mulatto, Mario de
Andrade quite literally embodied the ethnic diversity of what Gilberto
Freyre called a "mestizo" nation. An anthropologist and musicologist as
well as poet and novelist, Mario de Andrade compiled Amerindian, Luso-
Brazilian, and African legends to create the novel Macunaima, calling his
text a "rhapsody" in the musical sense of a "free fantasy on an epic, heroic
or national theme." Even the language of the novel is syncretic, constitut-
ing what de Andrade himself called a "veritable esperanto" which taps the
multiethnic linguistic genius of Brazilian Portuguese, fusing its Indianisms
and its Africanisms, its legends and songs and slang into a panfolkloric
saga. The fascination with ethnic plurality, in the novel, was motivated
not only by the author's status as a mulatto but also by the polyglot cul-
ture of Sao Paulo. In a I929 letter, Mario de Andrade describes what he
calls one of the "most human aspects of Sao Paulo:" the sight of its diverse
ethnic groups mingling in the street on a Saturday night. "I feel happy;' he
tells us, "among all the Hungarians, the Czechs, the Bulgarians, the Syri-
ans, the Austrians and the northeasterners who go out to have a good
time." It is a significant coincidence, perhaps, that both Mario de Andrade
and the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin were both elaborating the-
ories of artistic "polyphony" in the twenties. Polyphony, for Bakhtin,
refers to the coexistence, in any textual or extratextual situation, of a plu-
rality of voices that do not fuse into a single consciousness but rather gen-
erate dialogical dynamism among themselves. 1 De Andrade (I944) defined
polyphony as the "simultaneous artistic union of two or more melodies
A TALE OF TWO CITIES III

whose temporary effects of sonorous conflict collaborate to create a total

final effect;' a definition in some ways not terribly distant from Bahktin's.
And although neither author was thinking specifically of a polyphony of
ethnic voices per se, an ethnic interpretation is in no way excluded by the
term.
Both the novel and the film version of Macunaima are peopled by the
ethnic types that predominate in Brazilian life. In the first sequence, we see
an improbably old white woman (actually a man in drag) stand and grunt
until she/he deposits a wailing fifty-year-old black "baby" on the ground.
The names of the family members - Macunaima, Jigue, Manaape - are
Indian, but the family is at once black, Indian, and European. Apart from
this constant syncretism of the three major ethnic sources of Brazilian cul-
ture, the film also features other, more specific ethnic types. The industrial
magnate named Pietro Pietra, for example, was modeled in the novel on
nouveaux riches Italian immigrants, such as the members of the Mataraz-
zo family, who become very wealthy in Sao Paulo in the twenties. In the
film, the character is updated to represent Brazil's dependent national
bourgeoisie with its second-hand American technology, and his "Italian-
ness" is reduced to his name and his Italian accent in Portuguese.
But let us look with closer attention at the magical ethnic transforma-
tions that occur in both Zelig and Macunaima. There are two points in
the film Macunaima when the protagonist, born black, turns white. (He is
played by two actors, the black actor Grande Otelo and the white actor
Paulo Jose.) In the first, a woman named Sofara gives the child Macu-
naima a magic cigarette, which turns him into a handsome Portuguese
prince. The transformation, in this case, is an allegorical one, for the
woman is dressed in a sack on which we read: "Alliance for Progress:
Donated by the People of the United States;' The magic cigarette, then, is
the American aid that contributed to the short-lived Brazilian "economic
miracle" of the late sixties and seventies, which later gave way to the eco-
nomic disaster of runaway inflation and unbearable foreign debt.
In the second of these transformations, the black Macunaima enters a
magic fountain which turns him white. This sequence, occasionally mis-
read as racist by North Americans, is in fact a sardonic comment on Bra-
zil's putative "racial democracy" and on what is called in Brazil the "ideol-
ogy of whitening;' Although the author of the novel was proud of his
black ancestry and deeply involved in revalorizing the African cultural
heritage of Brazil, the characters in the film seem to idealize whiteness as
112 ROBERT STAM

having special value. Macunaima is delighted with his newfound white

beauty, and his black brother Jigue is disappointed that there is not
enough water to make him white as well. Black Brazilians, the film seems
to be saying, are the victims of the "ideology of whitening:' They have
absorbed the values of the white elite that oppresses them. Turning white
immediately changes the power situation for Macunaima as well. Upon
turning white, he immediately walks off with his black brother's girlfriend
as if there were never any question about his right to do so. The apparent
white-is-beautiful message is ironically undercut, however, by the sound
track. We hear an old romantic song entitled "Sob Uma Cascata" (By a
Waterfall), the Brazilian version of a song used by Lloyd Bacon in the 1933
film Footlight Parade, a film whose musical numbers were choreographed
by Busby Berkeley. The choice seems especially apt when we remember
that the original diegetic inspiration for the "By a Waterfall" number was
black children playing with the water spurting from a hydrant in Harlem,
a sight that suggests to the James Cagney character the spectacular possi-
bilities of waterfalls splashing on white bodies. The allusion suggests,
then, a complex play of black and white in both Brazil and the United
States, as well as the relation between the American musical comedy and
Brazil's carnivalized imitations of those comedies, the so-called chancha-
das or "filmes carnavalescos;' the genre in which Grande Otelo, the black
actor who plays Macunaima, was the most famous star.
Both Macunaima and Zelig treat the issue of racial and ethnic preju-
dice, and both treat it in a comic and satirical vein. At one point in Macu-
naima, the white brother Manaape explains to the black brother Jigue
why the black brother was arrested rather than himself, citing the popular
rhymed maxim: "Branco quando corre e campeao; preto quando corre e
ladrao" (A white man running is a champion; a black man running is a
thief). When the white Macunaima makes a disparaging remark about a
mulatto, Jigue responds: "Oh, so now that you're white you've become a
racist!" Zelig, meanwhile, makes comic and satiric references to anti-
semitism. In street fights with antisemites, Zelig complains, his parents
always sided with the antisemites. In France, we are told, Zelig's convinc-
ing transformation into a rabbi led some Frenchmen to want to send him
to Devil's Island. And as a black, Indian, and a Jew, the Ku Klux Klan sees
Zelig as a "triple threat:'
Both Macunaima and Zelig can be read as ironic odysseys of assimila-
tion. Black/Indian Macunaima goes from the Amazon to Sao Paulo, car-
A TALE OF TWO CITIES II3
rying with him the folkways associated with his origins; even in the city,
he sleeps in a hammock suspended over his bed. His turning white cer-
tainly facilitates his access to the elite and to power, but when he and his
urban-guerrilla wife have a child, that child is the same black Macunaima
whom we saw at the beginning of the film. Zelig, meanwhile, goes from
the lower east side to the centers of social power. In his flight from ghet-
toization, in his personal "ordeal of civility;' he demonstrates a weakness
for upward mobility. The psychopathology of assimilation even leads
him, at one point, to extremes of self-degradation, imaged by his ephem-
eral transformation into a Nazi. Zelig gains mobility and even wins access
to the Vatican and the Third Reich, but his mimicry is always incomplete,
always producing what Homi Babha calls "its slippage, its excess, its dif-
ference:' As a result, Zelig is ejected from the Papal Balcony and from the
Third Reich rostrum.
In Zeiig, each of the protagonist's ethnic transformations carries its spe-
cific weight of historical association. Zelig's recurrent chameleonizing to
blackness, for example, is deeply rooted not only in the experience of anti-
semitism in Europe but also in black/Jewish affinities in the United States.
The image of the "black Jew" was common in end-of-the-century Euro-
pean antisemitic tracts. Hermann Wegener called Jews "white negroes;'
and Julius Streicher, one of the most notorious antisemites of both the
Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, argued for a quasi-identity
between Jew and black. In the United States, meanwhile, New York-based
Jewish entertainers took over the preexisting tradition of blackface, en-
dowing it with their own accent and intonation. Al Jolson made blackface
recital the foundation of his success, while Sophie Tucker was billed as the
"World-Renowned-Coon-Shouter;' and Eddie Cantor played Salome in
blackface and in drag. The Jewish fondness for blackface, Irving Howe
(I976, 553) suggests, involves not only shrewd opportunities but also an
intuition of deeper affinities: "Black became a mask for Jewish expressive-
ness, with one woe speaking through the voice of another:' Blackface,
Howe suggests, paradoxically enabled Jewish performers to reach "a
spontaneity and assertiveness in the declaration of their Jewish selves:'
Cultural syncretism, in such a situation, was almost inevitable. Thus Irv-
ing Berlin mingled Yiddishisms with black musical conventions, Isaac
Goldberg found musical affinities between black "blue notes" and the
"blue note" of Hassidic chant, and Gershwin blended Yiddish folktunes
with black melodies, and all as part of a general syncresis both at the mar-
114 ROBERT STAM

gins and between the margins and a constantly changing mainstream. (It
was this kind of creative intermingling of cultures that led commentators
such as Randolph Bourne, in the twenties, to speak of the possibility of
New York City, with its infusions of diverse cultures, generating a "novel
international nation, the first the world has ever seen:')
While critics have emphasized the bizarre and improbable nature of
Zelig's ethnic transformations, they have generally ignored the deeper
social, cultural, and historical logic that structures them and the ways in
which these transformations are rooted in the cultural diversity of New
York City. Under hypnosis, for example, Zelig admits to dialogically cha-
meleonizing with another group of "hyphenated Americans:' Entering a
bar on Saint Patrick's Day, he relates: "I told them I was Irish. My hair
turned red. My nose turned up. I spoke about the great potato famine:' In
The Ordeal of Civility, John Murray Cuddihy (1974) explores the analo-
gies between the Irish and the Jewish immigrant communities as "latecom-
ers to modernity:' While the Irish were the product of the famines of the
1840S, which killed a million Irish and drove them into the world of
Anglo-American Protestantism, the Jews were the product of the Russian
pogroms, which killed thousands of East European Jews and drove them
too into the cultural universe of the New World goyim. Both groups had a
precarious grasp on political power, and both had a nostalgia for the Old
World convivium. Irving Howe (1976, 387) describes the relation between
the two groups within New York's political establishment as "generally
amiable, seldom close, and far more complicated than either side real-
ized:' All of Zelig's transformations, then, have their particular rationale
and specific resonances. It makes perfect sense, for example, that Zelig
would chameleonize, more or less "horizontally;' not only to his Irish fel-
low-swimmers in the melting pot, but also to other, more obviously
oppressed minorities - Indian, black, Chinese, Mexican. Zelig's repeated
transformation into the native American "Indian" - to take just one of
these examples - forges a symbolic link between what Todorov has called
Europe's "external other" - the Indian, the African, the Asian - and its
perennial internal "other" - the Jews.
Zelig's father, we are told by the voice-over, worked as an actor in a
Brooklyn theater, playing the role of Puck in the orthodox Yiddish version
of Midsummer Night's Dream. The Yiddish theater that "fathered" Zelig
was a theater full of wild transformations and boisterous polyglossia,
fond of oxymoronic protagonists such as the schlemiel-saint and the luft-
A TALE OF TWO CITIES

mensch-visionary. The immigrant experience in New York familiarized

Jewish actors and entertainers with a wide variety of ethnic accents and
intonations. Indeed, Zelig exemplifies the ironic "universe changing" and
the sometimes caricatural ethnic switchabouts typical of Yiddish-derived
theatricality, of Fanny Brice performing "I'm an Indian;' or Al Jolson in
blackface singing "Mammy;' or even, to anticipate, of Mel Brooks's Yid-
dish-speaking Indian in Blazing Saddles. 2
The inhabitants of cities such as New York and Sao Paulo pass their
lives within a complex web of ethnic interaction. The streets of these cit-
ies, with their intense and vibrant life, become a kind of medium in which
the diverse ethnicities meet, clash, and interact. Both Macunaima and
Zelig, through their ethnic transformations and hybridizations, underline
the necessarily syncretic nature of the self within the context of the mul-
tiethnic metropolis. As walking polyphonies of cultural personalities,
both Macunaima and Zelig mimic the appearance and impersonate the
voices of those with whom they come into contact. Their metamorphoses
render visible and palpable what usually remains invisible - the constant
process of syncretion that occurs when ethnicities brush against and rub
off on one another. Macunaima renders this syncretism visible not only
through its Indian/white and black protagonist but also through its diver-
sified music track, its syncretic decor, and multiethnic allusions. Zelig ren-
ders syncretism visible by offering us a figure who is at once recognizably
Woody Allen, and therefore white and Jewish, and black, Indian, Chinese,
and Irish. Woody Allen does not become Chinese, it is important to note;
he becomes a Chinese Woody Allen. The dialogical encounter, according
to Bakhtin, is never a complete merging, but rather a reciprocal hybridiza-
tion taking place within what Bahktin calls the in-between of two interlo-
cutors. One cannot finally become the other, both Zelig and Macunaima
indirectly suggest, but one can at least meet the other part-way, and this
process of interlocution, favored by the multiethnic city, inevitably leaves
all the interlocutors subtly changed.

Robert Starn is on the faculty of the Department of Cinema Studies in the Tisch
School of the Arts at New York University.
II6 ROBERT STAM

Notes and References

1. For more on the Bakhtinian conception of "polyphony;' see Bakhtin (1984).

2. For more on Zelig and ethnicity, see Starn and Shohat (1987).

Bakhtin, Mikhail
1984 Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press.
Cuddihy, John Murray
1974 The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish
Struggle with Modernity. Boston: Beacon.

De Andrade, Mario
1944 "A Escrava que Nao eIsaura;' in Obra Imatura. Sao Paulo: Martins.

Dean, Warren
1987 "0 Village ja Foi Brasileiro" [Greenwich Village Was Once Brazilian],
Folha de Sao Paulo, May 13.
Howe, Irving
1976 The World of Our Fathers. New York: Bantam Books.

Sleeper, Jim
1987 "Boodling, Bigotry and Cosmopolitanism: The Transformation of a
Civic Culture;' Dissent, 34,4:413-419.
Starn, Robert, and Ella Shohat
1987 "Zelig and Contemporary Theory;' Enclitic, 9, 1-2.
 Cities and Cinema:
A Selective Filmography
Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai
(Why Does Albert Pinto Get Angry?),
1980, Saeed Mirza
Alphaville, 1965, Jean-Luc Godard
A propos de Nice, 1927-29, Jean Vigo
Asakusa no hi (The Lights of Asakusa),
1937, Yasujiro Shimazu
Banshun (Late Spring), 1949, Yasujiro
Ozu
The Beastfrom 20,000 Fathoms, 1953,
Eugene Laurie
Berlin, die Sinfonie der Grossstadt
(Berlin, the Symphony of a Great City),
1927, Walter Ruttman
The Big City, 1963, Satyajit Ray
Blade Runner, 1982, Ridley Scott
Brazil, 1985, Terry Gilliam
A Bronx Morning, 1931, Jay Leyda
Calcutta, 1971, Louis Malle
Chayu puin (Madame Liberty), 1956,
Han Hyong-mo
Chelovek s Kinoapparatom (The Man
with the Movie Camera), 1928, Dziga
Vertov
Children of the City, 1944, Paul Rotha
Chip6mnun ch'6nsa (Homeless Angel),
1941, Ch'oe In-gyu
Ch6kto ui kkot (Tropical Flower),
1983, Pae Ch'ang-ho
Chronique d'un Ete (Chronicle of a
Summer), 1961, Jean Rouch
The City, 1939, Willard Van Dyke and
Ralph Steiner
City of Contrasts, 1930, Irving Brown-
ing
City Streets, 1931, Rouben Mamoulian
A Clockwork Orange, 1971, Stanley
Kubrick
The Crowd, 1928, King Vidor
Daitokai rodohen (The Great Metrop-
olis: Chapter on Labor), 1930, Kiyo-
hiko U shihara
Dawn of the Dead, 1979, George A.
Romero
Dead End, 1937, William Wyler
Devi (The Goddess), 1960, Satyajit Ray
Do Bigha Zamin (Two Acres of Land),
1953, Bimal Roy
Dokkoi ikiteiru (And Yet We Live),
1951, Tadashi Imai
II8
Duniya na Mane (The Unexpected),
1937, V. Shantaram
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, 1956, Fred
F. Sears
Easy Street, 1917, Charles Chaplin
Entotsu 0 mieru basho (From Where
Chimneys Are Seen), 1953, Heinosuke
Gosho
Escape from New York, 1981, John
Carpenter
Die Freudlose Gasse (The Joyless
Street), 1925, G. W. Pabst
Fahrenheit 451, 1966, Fran~ois Truf-
faut
Five, 1951, Arch Oboler
The French Connection, 1973, William
Friedkin
Furusato (Hometown), 1929, Kenji
Mizoguchi
Fuzen no tomoshibi (Candle in the
Wind), 1957, Keisuke Kinoshita
Gojira (Godzilla), 1954, Motoyoshi
Oda/Ichiro Honda
The Gold Diggers, 1984, Sally Potter
Hadaka no machi (The Naked Town),
1954, Tomu Uchida
Hatsukoi jigokuhen (The Inferno of
First Love), 1968, Susumu Hani
Hikari onna (Luminous Woman),
1987, Shinji Somai
Hiroshima Mon Amour, 1959, Alain
Resnais
Hiroshima-Nagasaki: August, 1945,
1970, Paul Ronder
Hitori musuko (The Only Son), 1936,
Yasujiro Ozu
House of Bamboo, 1955, Samuel Fuller
A SELECTIVE FILMOGRAPHY
Hungmaek (Black Wheat), 1965, Yi
Man-hiii
Ikimono no kiroku (Record of a Living
Being/I Live in Fear), 1955, Akira
Kurosawa
Ikiru, 1952, Akira Kurosawa
In Paris Parks, 1954, Shirley Clarke
In the Street, 1952, Helen Levitt
It's a Wonderful Life, 1946, Frank
Capra
Jana Aranya (The Middleman), 1975,
Satyajit Ray
Jeanne Dielman, 1975, Chantal Aker-
man
Jinsei gekijo (Theater of Life), 1937,
Tomu Uchida
Le Joli Mai, 1962, Chris Marker
Just Imagine, 1930, David Butler
Kanojo to kare (She and He), 1963,
SusumuHani
King Kong, 1933, Merian C. Cooper
and Ernest Schoedsack
Kino-Glaz (Kino-Eye), 1924, Dziga
Vertov
Kip'ko p'urun pam (Deep Blue Night),
1985, Pae Ch'ang-ho
Kippun uri chOlmun nal (Our Sweet
Days of Youth), 1987, Pae Ch'ang-ho
Kkobang tongne saramdUl (People in a
Slum), 1982, Pae Ch'ang-ho
Kulbi (Dried Fish), 1963, Kim Su-yong
Ladri di Biciclette (Bicycle Thieves),
1949, Vittorio de Sica
Os Libertarios (The Libertarians),
1973, Lauro Escorel
The Life of a Peking Policeman, 1950,
ShihHui
A SELECTIVE FILMOGRAPHY
Liquid Sky, 1983, Slava Tsukerman
Logan's Run, 1976, Michael Anderson
Lost Horizon, 1937, Frank Capra
Mabu (A Horsecart Driver), 1961,
Kang Tae-jin
Macunaima, 1969, Joaquim Pedro de
Andrade
Madamu to nyoba (The Neighbor's
Wife and Mine), 1931, Heinsosuke
Gosho
Manhatta, 1931, Charles Sheeler and
Paul Strand
Maya Miriga (The Mirage), 1984,
Nirad Mahapatra
Menschen am Sontag (People on Sun-
day), 1928, Robert Siomak
Metropolis, 1926, Fritz Lang
Nagareru (Flowing), 1960, Mikio
Naruse
The Naked City, 1948, Jules Dassin
Necrology, 1970, Standish Lawder
Night and the City, 1950, Jules Dassin
Night of the Comet, 1984, Thorn
Eberhardt
Nihonbashi, 1929, Kenji Mizoguchi
1984,1955, Michael Anderson
Nora inu (Stray Dog), 1948, Akira
Kurosawa
Notes on the Port of St. Francis, 1953,
Frank Stauffacher
La Nuit Electrique, 1930, Eugene
Deslaw
N. Y., N. Y., 1957, Francis Thompson
Obalt'an (Aimless Bullet), 1961, Yu
Hyon-mok
II9
Ohaya (Good Morning), 1958, Yasujiro
Ozu
Oktyabr (October), 1927, Sergei Eisen-
stein
On the Beach, 1959, Stanley Kramer
On the Town, 1949, Gene Kelly and
Stanley Donen
Otum iti chasiktUl (Children of Dark-
ness), 1981, Yi Chang-ho
Paar (Crossing), 1984, Gautam Ghosh
Parampura choitn nal (A Fine Windy
Day), 1980, Yi Chang-ho
Paris, 1900,1947, Nicole Vedres
Paris Qui Dort, 1923, Rene Clair
Planet of the Apes, 1968, Franklin
Schaffner
Pyaltitl iti kohyang (Home of the
Stars), 1974, Yi Chang-ho
Repo Man, 1984, Alex Cox
Rien que les Heures, 1926, Alberto
Cavalcanti
Roma, Citta Aperta (Rome, Open
City), 1945, Roberto Rossellini
Sans Solei!, 1985, Chris Marker
sao Paulo, Sociedade Anomina (Sao
Paulo, Inc.,), 1966, Sergio Person
Shagai, Soviet (Stride, Soviet, USSR),
1926, Dziga Vertov
Shinjuku doroba nikki (Diary of a
Shinjuku Thief), 1969, Nagisa Oshima
Shitamachi (Downtown), 1957, Yasuki
Chiba
Sijang (The Market), 1965, Yi Man-hili
Skyscraper, 1959, Shirley Clarke
Sash un (Early Spring), 1956, Yasujiro
Ozu
120
Sous les Toits de Paris (Under the
Roofs of Paris), 1930, Rene Clair
Soylent Green, 1973, Richard Fleischer
Subarashiki nichiyobi (One Wonderful
Sunday), 1947, Akira Kurosawa
Sunday in Peking, 1955, Chris Marker
Sunrise, 1927, F. W. Murnau
Suopryo (Tuition), 1:940, Ch'oe In-gyu
Things to Come, 1936, William
Cameron Menzies
Tokai kokyogaku (Metropolitan Sym-
phony), 1929, Kenji Mizoguchi
TOkyo koshinkyoku (Tokyo March),
1929, Kenji Mizoguchi
TOkyo monogatari (Tokyo Story), 1953,
Yasujiro Ozu
TOkyo no gassho (Chorus of Tokyo),
1931, Yasujiro Ozu
TOkyo senso sengo hiwa (The Man
Who Left His Will on Film), 1970,
Nagisa Oshima
Ton (Money), 1958, Kim So-dong
A SELECTIVE FILMOGRAPHY
Tosiro kan ch'onyo (Girls Who Went to
the City), 1979, Kim Sa-yong
Touch of Evil, 1958, Orson Welles
Umareta wa mita keredo (1 Was Born,
But . .. ),1932, Yasujiro Ozu
Wangsimni, 1979, 1m Kwon-t'aek
Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru (The
Bad Sleep Well), 1960, Akira Kurosawa
When Worlds Collide, 1951, Rudolph
Mate
The Wonder Ring, 1955, Stan Brakhage
The World, the Flesh and the Devil,
1959, Ranald MacDougall
The Wrong Man, 1957, Alfred Hitch-
cock
Yoidore tenshi (Drunken Angel), 1948,
Akira Kurosawa
YOngja ui chonsong sidae (The Heyday
ofYOng-ja), 1975, Kim Ho-son
Zelig, 1984, Woody Allen
La Zone, 1929, Georges Lacombe
Compiled by Donald Richie
 Book Review
George Stephen Semsel, editor, Chi-
nese Film: The State of the Art in the
People's Republic. New York:
Praeger Publishers, 1987. xvii, 191
pages, illustrations. $34.95.
As the rising tide of Chinese cinema on
the international film scene becomes
ever more impossible to ignore, so does
the woeful lack of English-language
studies on this important national cin-
ema. In these circumstances, one can-
not but understand and applaud the
motivation behind this compilation of
essays and interviews. In the best of
circumstances, such a collection of
materials would intersect productively.
However, in this case the end result is
somewhat less than the sum of its
parts, and although one essay is excel-
lent, a minefield of factual and typo-
graphical errors seriously undermines
the rest of the book.
To start with the good news, the
Chinese scholar Ma Ning, now study-
ing in Australia, has contributed an
analysis of new trends over the last ten
years, modestly titled "Notes on the
New Filmmakers:' This is quite simply
one of the best pieces of writing on
contemporary Chinese cinema availa-
ble anywhere in the world and should
be required reading for all wishing to
acquaint themselves with the subject.
Bringing together his thorough knowl-
edge of the methods and theories of
Western film analysis with a careful
and pertinent awareness of his own
culture, Ma constructs his argument
for the relevance of humanism and its
resurgence in China to an understand-
ing of the new cinema through a series
of careful and close readings of impor-
tant texts. His analyses of the films of
Yang Yanjin in the light of the episte-
mological crisis of the late seventies is
particularly masterful.
Also useful is Patricia Wilson's oral
history account of the early days of
Communist China's cinema in the
Northeast. It provides detailed memo-
ries of a period about which little con-
crete information has hitherto been
available. However, the period was
also very disordered, and the addition
of maps and biographies of the numer-
ous people mentioned would help the
less informed reader to make sense of
the narrative. Indeed, without bio-
graphical notes, the reader cannot be
expected to know that the woman
mentioned as Tian Fang's wife on page
29, "Yu Lin;' is the same person as the
"Yu Lan" mentioned on page 33, and
that the name should in fact be "Yu
Lan" throughout.
This is only one of the many typo-
graphical errors that vitiate whatever
reference value the book might have
121
122
completely. Neither Semsel nor Praeger
Publishers seems to be aware that the
apostrophe is an integral part of the
Pinyin romanization system. Yan'an is
printed "Yanan" throughout, and Xi'an
appears throughout as "Xian:' Even
Chen Bo'er's name is printed as "Chen
Boer" - whatever else she was, Chen
Bo'er was not a South African. Mis-
spellings are also common. "Hanzhou"
should be Hangzhou (p. 3), "Ye Jian-
yin" should be Ye Jianying (p. 15),
"Long Zifeng" should be Ling Zifeng
(p. 26), "Su Yu" should be Su Yun (p.
27), and so on. Things reach their
worst when Madame Mao's name
(Jiang Qing) is rendered as "Qing
Jiang" (p. 7).
Factual errors abound, too. In the
biographical notes, editor Semsel is
described as having worked for "China
Film Corporation, the state enterprise
responsible for all matters of film busi-
ness within the country:' Presumably
he supplied this information himself.
However, China Film Corporation is
only responsible for distribution and
exhibition, and all other aspects of film
business, in particular production and
coproduction, are in the hands of other
organizations. When the editor of the
book does not know the basics about
his employer for a whole year, one has
to wonder about his grasp of the rest of
his information. And indeed, when he
can blandly state in his introduction
that "In the 1950S and 1960s the film
industry ran quite smoothly;' apparent-
ly in complete ignorance of the upheav-
als of the anti-Rightist campaign, the
"cultural revolution;' and other move-
ments, one knows one is not necessar-
ily in good hands.
Apart from the materials he himself
BOOK REVIEW
originated, looking at the article al-
leged to be on film theory by Xia
Hong, it becomes evident that Semsel
also decided to be an editor with a light
touch, despite the fact that parts of this
article are translated so appallingly
that they make no sense at all. Words
not found in any English dictionary,
even the sort of Chinese-English dictio-
nary produced in Taiwan, such as
"conceptualism" and "labelism" are
thrown about, and the reader is even
presented with the sentence "Filmmak-
ing challenges theory filmmaking" (p.
36). This article certainly challenged
me!
Finally, the interviews that make up
about half the book are enormously
disappointing. Apart from the highly
variable standard of translation, and
the factual errors about personal histo-
ries that one doubts the subjects could
have really made, the results are vague,
uninformed and dull, largely confined
to confused reminiscence, hesitant
opinion, and lists of favorite Holly-
wood movies. Is it that all the subjects
were vague, uninformed, and dull, or
was there a problem with the questions
that were asked? Since the questions
are not printed, we will never know.
All this compels me to address a
more serious issue. I cannot under-
stand how so compromised a book was
ever published. How did Semsel, who
all too apparently speaks no Chinese
and knows little about China, Praeger
sociology editor Alison Podel (is this a
sociology book?), and foreword writer
Professor Robert Wagner, maybe a
communications expert but hardly fa-
mous for his intimate knowledge of the
Chinese cinema, get the nerve to think
they were qualified to produce this
BOOK REVIEW
book? What sort of racism and cultural
presumption makes it possible for a
book like this on Chinese cinema to be
published, when I sincerely hope I am
right in thinking a similar manuscript
on the French or German cinema
would never have seen the light of day?
All in all, apart from Ma's article,
one would need to be an expert in the
Chinese cinema already to be able to
pick through this book and extract
whatever there might be of value in it. I
had high hopes of this volume, and I
know George Semsel developed a deep
love of the Chinese cinema during his
12 3
stay in China. I am sure he produced
this book with the best of intentions,
but I am dismayed that he could not
even secure the help and expertise to
ensure that names were spelled right.
In his foreword, Professor Wagner re-
marks that the book "is a volume
which, in addition to the light it sheds
on the new Chinese cinema, is a re-
minder that we are all still the primi-
tives in this medium:' How sadly and
ironically accurate he has proved to be!
CHRIS BERRY
Griffith University